And as the world became more dangerous, as the ship’s fabric and matériel corroded, so did the morale of those crowded aboard, surrounded by shabbiness and peril and the endless sea . . .
A salty wind stirred her hair. She looked to the north, to the storm system that was a brooding band across the horizon. Was that cloud band growing thicker? In which case—
Her phone pinged. She dug it out of her wetsuit, opened it up. “Piers?”
“Lily. Get back here.”
She heard a deep thrumming, a growl of turbulent water. The wall of the ship’s hull edged past her, and her dinghy bobbed. Unbelievably, although she and the kids and the divers were still in the water, the Ark’s screws were turning.
“Piers? What the hell is going on? Is it the storm?”
“Not that. Fetch Manco and get back aboard, now. There’s trouble. I think—”
A boat roared past her, painted gray as the sea. Its wash nearly turned the dinghy over. Lily had to grab the sides to keep from being thrown overboard, and she dropped the phone. She scrabbled for it in the water that puddled in the bilge.
The motor boat turned in a tight circle, sending a spray of foam over the Ark’s hull. Lily thought she heard children scream. Then divers lunged out of the boat and into the water, two, three, four of them. They carried weapons, big tubes like bazookas. One of them started firing before he hit the water, and she heard bullets sing, splashing into the sea. The AxysCorp divers were struggling to form up, to respond. But she saw trails of turbulence, like the wake of miniature torpedoes, stitching through the crowd of AxysCorp divers, and they writhed and died while crimson blood seeped out. Conventional shots rang out, Nathan’s crew firing down from the decks, but the sea blocked their bullets and unless they happened to catch a bandit out of the water there was little chance of hurting them.
All along the length of the hull more of the bandit craft were racing in, more divers with their unwieldy weapons hitting the water.
Lily just watched, shocked into immobility by the attack’s suddenness, and by the effectiveness of the bandits’ weapons. She knew that Nathan’s technicians had been working on the problems of underwater combat. You could, for instance, insert a pulse of high-pressure gas into the water, and your bullet would drag the air with it, slipstreaming its way through. Or you could use the water itself, shoot out high-pressure pulses that moved so fast they cavitated, creating low-pressure volumes of vapor that would go zinging through the ocean, the world’s deadliest water pistol . . .
On the Ark, all this was still experimental. The AxysCorp divers had no answer to this attack, no operational weapon save harpoons, like bows and arrows against flintlocks, like Incas against the Spaniards. We were complacent, Lily thought. We aren’t tough enough to compete out here in a world of ocean scavengers, and now we’re going to pay the price.
And then she heard a cry, a boy’s voice. She came out of her shock in an instant. That had been Manco.
Inside the swimming rope, while the divers fought at its perimeter, the children were scrambling out of the water, dragging themselves up a rope ladder which was itself being hauled up into the ship. But one boy still thrashed in the water, leaping for a rope ladder that was passing out of his reach. It was Manco. He didn’t have his flotation belt on. He’d probably taken it off so he could dive.
Lily didn’t think about it. “I’m coming, hold on!” She fired up the boat’s engine and surged over the sea scattering bits of vividly colored garbage. If she could get to the rope cordon she might be able to reach Manco, and haul him in. Then if she could get away, around the far side of the Ark—
The bullet spray stitched the length of the dinghy. Without thinking she dropped over the side, through the shallow crust of garbage and into the water with a shock of cold, and her head filled with the noises of the sea.
And then she was hit. She actually felt the shot enter her leg, above the ankle, and pass through her flesh and out through her wetsuit. She didn’t know if it was the pirates or her own side. The wound wasn’t painful. It just felt cold.
More bullets ripped through the dinghy, a drifting shadow above her, and sang through the water like diving birds. And she was sinking. She felt the water push into her ears, its salt stinging her eyes, washing in her mouth, salty, bloody. She wasn’t far below the surface, and the light was strong; she watched as a plastic cap emblazoned with a soft drink logo turned in the water before her face, more indestructible than the pyramids, pointless and beautiful. This was the nightmare she had dreaded since splashing through drowning London, which she had climbed mountains and boarded a damn cruise liner to escape. At last the water had got her, she was immersed, and sinking into a boundless ocean.
Manco. She had to find him. She thrashed and inhaled water, spluttered, coughed, and inhaled more. She felt a tearing in her chest, a burning. Water in the airway. She worked arms and legs, trying to complete breaststrokes, but her wounded leg pulsed with pain when she tried to move it.
Something rose past her, bright orange—a flotation belt. She couldn’t tell how far away it was. She reached out, grabbed it. It pulled her up, like a balloon. Trying not to inhale again, she looked up to the surface, seeking the ship. She saw it, a black wall that divided her universe in half. She was dimly aware of the churning screws; she had to keep away from them for fear of being dragged in and cut to pieces.
She broke the surface at last. She emerged gasping, spewing out water, into a riot of noise, of gunshots and cries, Nathan ranting over his loudhailer, the deep churning of the screws. The waves closed over her face, and she 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 living in a machined environment, to living at sea. And the crew befriended him. Supplies ran him up a kid-sized version of the standard-issue blue coverall and gave him a red SSGN New Jersey baseball cap to wear. Lily learned that only the captain was ordinarily entitled to the grandeur of a red cap, so it was quite an honor.
After maybe a week, the medics let Lily out of her cage. She was issued with sneakers and a blue coverall of her own, and Thandie took her on gentle walks.
The boat’s interior was all corridors, brightly lit by fluorescent strips. The curve of the pressure-hull walls was obvious. The roof was a tangle of ducts and pipes and cables, and the walls were paneled with instrument boxes. It was a noisy place, the crew’s voices echoing from the steel walls, overlaid by the rasp of a tannoy system relaying orders mostly incomprehensible to Lily. She was surprised that most of the doors were rectangular, ordinary-looking, unlike the curved wheel-handled hatches of the submarine dramas of her childhood. Thandie said there were only a handful of watertight doors on the boat, separating the big compartments, and those doors were circular, not oval.
The New Jersey was a hundred and seventy feet long, beam forty-two feet—the US Navy still worked in feet and inches—which made her a big boat, but you could walk her length in minutes. Despite some artful paintwork there was a continual sense of claustrophobia, and you could never forget you were in the guts of a machine.
“I hope Manco’s not making any trouble down here.”
“The men think he’s terrific.”
“I guess they would. But he’s used to the space of the Ark. And he gets to go swimming whenever we heave to. He must be rattling around in this tin can like a wasp in a jam jar.”
Thandie shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. There are sports facilities. Exercise machines like treadmills and bikes, virtual reality systems where you can play tennis and so on. The guys wear him out. Mind you, since he was shown the control room, he’s been nagging to have a crack at piloting the boat. The helm is a joystick, like a games console.”
“He’ll have us leaping out of the water like a salmon if he gets the chance.”
Thandie laughed. “There are simulators, a big educational suite in the galley. We’re allowing him time on that. Don’t worry about him. The Chief of the Boat told me he would take personal care that Manco doesn’t get into any trouble.”
“Well, thank him for me.”
This was an Ohio-class boat, Thandie told her, her keel laid down long before the flood. Once she had carried Trident nuclear missiles, but she had been refitted as an SSGN, her missio
n to launch guided missiles and other conventional weapons: Tomahawk cruise missiles, unmanned air vehicles, various reconnaissance systems.
The nuclear submarines, designed for cruises lasting months with minimal resupply and refurbishment, continued to patrol the world. They were used to maintain physical contact with the scattered communities that were the refuge of mankind—and to protect the interests of the US. The subs were armed, some of them still bearing nukes, and this crew had seen action, Thandie said, mostly escorting convoys or driving off attempted forced landings on the US coastline. But most potential aggressors were far away from the remnant continental US, and the Denver government rarely intervened in third-party conflicts. The days when the US had acted as a global policeman were over.
And the boats served as floating platforms for scientists like Thandie, oceanographers and climatologists and biologists studying the fast-changing world—even historians and anthropologists recording what was becoming of the remnants of mankind.
Lily grunted. “Recording for who?”
“Well, we never ask such questions.”
The crew was a hundred and forty enlisted men and fifteen officers, all men also, and a handful of passengers, mostly scientists like Thandie, men and women. They all wore the ubiquitous blue coveralls and soft sneakers, though the officers wore khaki belts rather than black, and had rank insignias on their lapels. Many wore baseball caps, faded souvenirs of long-disbanded sports teams.
Traditionally the enlisted men on a boat like this would have been young, but aboard the New Jersey there were few under thirty, and the mean age seemed to be late forties. Recruitment into the Navy had been wound down in recent years, Thandie said. As the subs and ships approached the end of their operational lives, the Navy just kept on the men until they retired with their boats. And besides, the men themselves didn’t want to be anywhere else; where on Earth was there a better environment than this?
Flood Page 42
