Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “The storm front is approaching the Barrier,” Sanjay said, peering into his laptop. “I guess this is the moment of truth.”

  Gary asked, “So will the water overtop the Barrier?”

  “Ah,” said Sanjay.“That’s the forty-billion-dollar question. It’s a 1960s design based on 1960s assumptions about future flood event probabilities. Even before this new sea-level rise phenomenon, the revised projections based on global warming were ringing alarm bells-”

  “The police are asking us for help,” Thandie said, listening to her radio feed. “They’re organizing pickup zones. Kids, women with babies, the sick and injured. We can take some out to higher ground. Keep running until our fuel gives out.”

  “Here it comes,” Sanjay said, staring at his screen.“I think the water’s overtopping the Barrier gates. My word.”

  Gary looked at Thandie. “Let’s help.”

  “Yeah.” The helicopter dropped out of the sky toward the darkened carcass of Lakeside.

  13

  I nside the Dome at Greenwich, Amanda was almost relieved when the arena show was cut short by the evacuation announcements. Everybody stood up and streamed into the aisles, excited despite the distant ringing of fire alarms. It was nearly the end of a long day anyhow, Amanda supposed, and she knew kids; most of the audience here would be ready for the bright lights of the tube station or the warmth of their buses, ready for home. As for Amanda herself, whiskery boy bands singing Elizabethan madrigals for “educational” purposes, as mandated by the national curriculum, wasn’t her idea of a fun way to spend the afternoon.

  But Amanda and Benj sat on either side of an empty seat. Kristie had gone off to the loo. Uncertain, Amanda glanced across at Benj. “She’ll have the sense to come back here, won’t she?”

  But Benj didn’t reply. He sat back in his chair, a dreamy, absent look on his face. She had put an embargo on his Angel during the show, but he had snapped it on as soon as the evacuation order came over

  the PA.

  Amanda worried vaguely. She didn’t even know what the alarm was about. She’d heard people muttering about terrorist scares, but she was willing to bet that the filthy weather had something to do with it. A flood on the Jubilee Line, the underground route that had brought her here with the kids; that was more likely it. But she fretted about what it would mean for her if the tube was flooded. The underground was the main way you got off the peninsula. There must be buses, but they would be packed. They faced hours waiting around, maybe in the rain, and the kids would be fractious.

  She glanced around. Most people had gone already, this two-thousand-seat “Indigo2” arena draining remarkably quickly, only a few stragglers remaining. No sign of Kristie. Amanda wondered if she should go to the toilets to find her.

  It occurred to her to try her phone. When she called Kristie she got a “no signal” message.

  She paged around news services, trying to find out what was happening. There was no reception from the local services, even the BBC. She got a CNN feed, but that didn’t feature whatever was going on in London but the latest problems in Sydney, Australia, where the flooding had worsened markedly. Amanda stared at pictures taken from the air, of water spilling from the harbors deep into central Sydney, and a panicky evacuation from the glass needles of the CBD, Sydney’s central business district. The highways out of the city were jammed, and there was a crush at the main rail station, though reports said that the trains had already been stopped. Even now the cameras lingered on the postcard icons. The Opera House stood on a kind of island of its own, cut off from the mainland. It was like looking at movie special effects.

  She shut her phone down and glanced around. No Kristie.

  A Dome staff member walked up the aisle toward them. He was a young man with vertical red hair. He was chewing gum. “Sorry, Miss. You have to go. We need to clear the venue.”

  Miss. Amanda smiled; he was only a few years older than Benj. “I’m waiting for my daughter. She’s in the lavatory.”

  “I’m sorry but you have to go now. It’s my job to get the venue clear.”

  “I’m waiting for my daughter.”

  The boy backed off, nervously, but he seemed distracted; he must be getting instructions from an Angel of his own. “Please. I’ll have to call security. I have to clear the venue. It’s the evacuation plan.”

  Benj stood up. “Oh, come on, Mum, there’s no point winding him up. She’s probably hanging around outside the toilets anyhow. You know what’s she’s like.”

  She felt oddly reluctant to stand up, to leave the seat without Kristie. It meant a definitive break with her normal day. But she supposed this boy was telling the truth about security; she had no choice. “All right.” She stood and followed Benj out of the row of seats.

  They made their way to the main entrance area. This was a cavernous plaza facing a row of glass doors, lined to either side by ticket offices and shops, a deserted Starbucks. The Dome roof itself loomed over her, a faintly grimy tent that trapped hot, moist, stale air. She could hear the drumming of the rain on the canvas panels high above. It was always gloomy in here, enclosed.

  There was no sign of Kristie outside the loo. Another staff member, a hefty woman this time, wouldn’t allow her to go and look inside.“The toilets are clear, ma’am.”

  “But that’s where my daughter went.”

  “The toilets are clear. She can’t be in there.”

  “Look, she’s eleven years old!”

  “I’m sure you’ll find her waiting for you at your party’s emergency assembly point.”

  That threw Amanda from anger to a feeling of inadequacy, of helplessness. “What assembly point? I don’t know anything about an assembly point.”

  “I do, Mum,” Benj said. “It was on our tickets. Car Park Four.”

  The woman pointed. “It’s signposted, very easy to find.” Her walkie-talkie squawked, and with an apologetic glance at Amanda she turned away.

  Benj took the lead again. “I know the way, Mum. Come on.”

  “Let’s try calling her again.”

  Benj lifted his own phone. The screen flashed red: no signal. “I’ve been trying. I can’t even leave a message. Look, she’s not completely thick. She knows where to go.”

  “Well, I hope so.” She followed him, reluctantly, but she knew there was no choice.

  They were among the last to leave the Dome; the crowds had streamed out quickly. As they crossed the floor of the entrance plaza they were joined by the last stragglers emerging from Entertainment Avenue, the big circular shopping mall that curved around the arena at the Dome’s core, a corridor of shops and restaurants, fancy lamp posts, even trees flourishing in the tented gloom.

  They emerged into rain driven almost horizontally by the wind. Amanda glanced back at the Dome. The rain ricocheted off its dirty fabric roof. She could see only a little of it; it looked oddly unimpressive, for its curve created a horizon so close to her eye it hid its own true scale. Bad design, she thought. And when she looked away from the Dome, toward the car park, she saw massed, chaotic crowds. She had no way of judging numbers. There might have been tens of thousands here, a mob like a football crowd. Her heart went cold as the scale of what was happening began to press on her.

  Benj took her hand, holding his hood closed around his face. “This way to the car park.” They made their way forward, splashing through water that puddled on the concrete and tarmac and gradually formed more extensive ponds. People milled everywhere, shuffling along in their raincoats. But nobody seemed alarmed. The younger children were excited. Nobody seemed upset except Amanda. Benj and Amanda tried their mobiles again, but there was still no signal.

  There was some kind of emergency going on around the tube station. The station itself had been fenced off by a barrier, manned by bedraggled police. Amanda stared at a steady stream of soaked, frightened-looking passengers, emerging on foot from the deep tube line. Paramedics in Day-Glo coats, working in pairs, forced their way in through
the emerging crowd, and came out again carrying stretchers.

  The sight of the drenched people, the bodies on the stretchers, horrified Amanda. She found it impossible to believe that only half an hour ago, less, she had been sitting in an arena, warm and relaxed with her kids beside her, listening to a boy band murder madrigals. And now, this. Had people died?

  And if the Jubilee Line was flooded, the tube network was probably shut down entirely. Travel was going to be a nightmare, even once they got off Greenwich. Bit by bit the day continued to unravel.

  Benj pulled her hand. “Come on, Mum, I’m getting cold.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.” They hurried on.

  14

  Lily and Piers had to wait for a chopper to take them from Shoeburyness to Greenwich. The hydrometropole’s limited landing facilities were clogged by craft whisking parties off to their “disaster vacations.” This was a kind of insurance policy offered by Nathan’s AxysCorp, where in the event of a calamity like a flood you were just taken away to a luxury hotel, somewhere safe, to ride it out, and let somebody else deal with the mess. Lily was bemused to see how accustomed the world had become to disaster. Some of these fleeing plutocrats didn’t even pause in their drinking as they were escorted smoothly from party venue to vacation transport.

  At last Lily and Piers got their chopper, and lifted. The wind was rising all the time, and even this pilot’s consummate skill couldn’t save the bird from shuddering as it rose, the hull groaning, the engine roaring as the rotors bit into the turbulent air.

  The delay hadn’t been long, but enough that by the time they flew over greater London, heading west, the flooding was already extensive. The river had breached the flood defenses on both banks, and buildings and lamp posts and trees protruded from the water like toys in puddles. Evacuations continued frantically all along the line of the rising water, the roads crammed with chains of slow-moving cars, trucks, buses, fire engines and ambulances, their lights gleaming like jewels, and with a denser, porridgelike mass that had to be people fleeing on foot, too many of them and too far away to distinguish, human beings reduced to particles.

  Piers looked down at the inundation, his gaze frank and intelligent, listening in to the police feeds. A situation like this should bring out the best in him, Lily thought, his training and instinct for command. But he was pale, and he had lost weight like the rest of the hostages. Their captivity was only six days past, and they all had finite reserves. But the world evidently wasn’t going to wait for their recovery.

  When they passed over the Thames Barrier the pilot dipped to give them a view. The Barrier, a line that cut across the river, was overtopped all along its length, and a kind of waterfall thundered down on the upstream side, throwing up spray and churning up the river water.

  “That,” Piers murmured, “is a sight to tell your grandchildren about. A once in a thousand years event, supposedly. Actually the Barrier is itself now the subject of a rescue operation. Chaps trapped in the control towers, and in some kind of connecting tunnel under the river. The city’s defenders now need defending themselves. Well.” He turned away.

  The chopper dipped and surged onward again, heading steadily west.

  At last they swept over Greenwich. The pilot stayed high, keeping out of the way of the rescue operations already underway.

  Here the river described a fat S-shape in a great double meander, creating two peninsulas, one dangling from the north bank and the other from the south, from Lily’s vantage pressed up against each other like yin and yang twins. The fatter, pendulous peninsula on the left was the Isle of Dogs, a tongue of lowland incised by dock developments, some centuries old; to the north, at its neck, the huge new office developments around Canary Wharf sprawled, acres of glass glistening. The slimmer peninsular to the right, pushing up from the south, was Greenwich. Lily could clearly see at its tip the spiky dirty-gray disc that was the Dome-once the Millennium Dome, now called “The O2.” Somewhere down there were her sister and the kids.

  All this was only a few kilometers west of the breached Barrier. And already the waters were breaking over the land to north and south, drowning wharves and jetties and flooding jammed roads, and choppers hovered over the landscape, angels of despair.

  “Unbelievable, you know,” Piers Michaelmas said. “Thirty years ago, forty, hardly any of this was here. Just the docks, the old housing stock. Derelict, basically. Now look at it. The police are saying there are somewhere over half a million people down there right now, in the office blocks and the leisure developments. It’s a blister, a huge concentration of people.”

  “All on the flood plain.”

  “Hindsight is a marvelous thing.” He listened again. “I know you want to get to the Dome and find your sister, yes? But I’m being called to the Isle of Dogs, Millwall, a major evacuation there.”

  “We’ll split up, then.”

  “Yes.” He leaned forward. “Pilot, did you get that?”

  The pilot nodded, distracted, listening to his own feed. “My computer’s asking for clearance. Having to talk to two different Silver Command stations… I can take you to Millwall first, sir. Put you down in Mudchute Park, they’ve given me clearance for that. Then I’ll hop over to Greenwich with Captain Brooke.”

  “That’ll do,” Michaelmas said.

  The chopper slid north over the river and dipped down toward the Isle of Dogs. Detail coalesced, housing, a park, streets already running with filthy water, and Lily made out the line of the DLR, the Docklands Light Railway, striding on its elevated track toward the north. A group of police and military trucks had been drawn up in the park, evidently some kind of field command post. The water lapped around the vehicles’ wheels.

  The pilot set down gently on sodden grass. The door slid open, allowing in a buffeting wind and a spray of cold rain.

  Piers pulled up his hood, grabbed an emergency pack, released his harness and clambered out of his bucket seat. He twisted back and grabbed Lily’s hand. “Good luck,” he yelled.

  “You too. Now piss off and close the ruddy door.”

  He grinned and stepped out. The door slid closed, and the chopper lifted immediately. Piers watched the bird rise, his hand sheltering his eyes from the rain.

  Piers made his way straight to the field command center in the park.

  His rank, and recognition by some of the officers, got him into a meeting in a briefing room full of laptops, TV screens and whiteboards, into the center of things. Here the local chief constable hosted a rolling conference with representatives of the ambulance and fire services, the local authority, the utilities, the Environment Agency, transport, health, and the media, a couple of local reporters. The British system was to have the police at the heart of the management of civil emergencies. Most of the attendees here had mobiles clamped to their heads. Piers knew the mobile networks had been co-opted for the emergency services’ use, a shutout that would be giving civilians problems by now, even if the power hadn’t failed to the phone masts.

  Piers listened for a while. The centerpiece of the planning seemed to be the evacuation of the most flood-prone areas, which was in fact most of Millwall. With the roads already clogged, the plan was to get the public out using the Docklands Light Railway, north and to the mainland. It was only a few kilometers; nowhere in London was far from anywhere else, geographically. The DLR ran on an elevated rail, above the anticipated flooding, and even when the power went it could conceivably be used as a walkway.

  Of course what would become of the refugees after that was anybody’s guess. City Airport was flooded. Traffic was clogged all over London, and there was a solid jam on the M25 rippling back from the flooding at the Dartford Crossing. And there were other problems. Aside from the pressure on the mobile networks, Docklands hosted some major internet service providers and international landline telephone exchanges; communications were fritzing all over the place as the area was flooded, building by building.

  Piers knew about the wider disaster man
agement strategy. The efforts of dozens of groups like this across London would be fed up to a “Gold Coordinating Group” chaired by a senior police officer, which would in turn report to the Cabinet’s crisis committee. And even beyond that, he was sure, given an emergency on such a scale there would be contacts among the international community. He had already seen Chinooks over the river, the Americans putting military assets into play from their bases in the UK, and the Europeans must be planning recovery and support packages. There was huge tension in the room, a clamor of voices, phones ringing constantly, heavy lines scrawled across maps and then scrawled again, as the group tried to handle the many facets of this multiple, unfolding disaster. Piers imagined being drawn into these frantic discussions, his advice sought, a new role defined, new responsibilities assigned. He was trained for command-level roles; in theory there was much he could contribute here.

  But he felt oddly brittle, his head somehow full. He began to avoid eye contact, as if he could not bear to be engaged. He had an odd flashback to the cellars under Barcelona, the times the guards would maliciously whip away his towels or blindfolds and try to catch him with his eyes open, to break through to his soul.

  He needed to get out of here, he realized suddenly. He slipped out and back into the storm, pulling his hood over his head, and walked off into the streets.

  Car Park Four was on the far side of the square. All the car parks had been full when Amanda and the kids had arrived this morning, but now most of the cars had already gone or were packing the exits, their tail lights crowding red, leaving behind a surface of pale pink gravel slick with water.

  Benj pointed to the left, toward the river side.“I think that’s our point over there.” Amanda saw a huddle of fifty or so adults and children, one of a number of such groups gathered under signposts all across the plain of car parks. Benj’s eyes were sharper than hers, and he was good at remembering instructions; she was sure he was right.