Flood

25

October 2017

Nathan Lammockson had Lily flown into Keflavik airport, thirty kilometers west of Reykjavik.

An AxysCorp car met her there and drove her, not into the city itself, but inland, across desolate country. She glimpsed mountains, ice-crested. She was curious about this strange island; it was the first time she had visited. But she had no time to explore. Now that Lammockson had got hold of his bathyscaphe it was full speed ahead with his ocean survey project, and Lily was suddenly pitched into a whole new phase of her life. Lily Brooke, submarine pilot: who’d have thought it?

They arrived at what looked like a staid hotel. It turned out to be Bessastadhir, the residence of the president of Iceland.

The next morning Lily waited outside the residence for the car to return. The air was fresh and cold, with a bite in the wind from the sea, but there was no frost on the ground, no snow. Her usual AxysCorp coverall kept her warm enough, but she pulled the hood up around her face.

The car showed up, flying an AxysCorp cradled-Earth flag. This time Lammockson himself was in the back. And up front, Gordon James Alonzo was driving. Lily buckled up fast. Gordo drove like an astronaut; she’d learned that from the time she’d spent with him in the States. She hung on to the door grip as the car was thrown down the drive and out onto the road.

Lammockson offered her coffee in a lidded plastic cup. She refused, but he took a deep draft from his own cup, and there was a strong aroma. Lammockson wore a heavy overcoat of what looked like fake fur, finely tailored, very expensive; he used up most of the room on this seat. Before her the back of Gordo’s head was like a warhead, solid, stubbled with silver-gray hair; a stocky man, big for an astronaut, he was around forty-five.

“So,” Lammockson grinned at her. “Enjoying your trip so far, Lily? How do you like staying at the White House of Iceland?”

“Yes, how did you swing that with the president?”

“Well, the old girl owes me. I’ve brought enough investment and employment to this Godforsaken rock in the last few months, while every other ‘entrepreneur’ around the world is filling sandbags and lying low. Besides, half the hotels in Reykjavik are flooded out, you’ll see, same as everywhere else. And now you’re being chauffeured by a genu-wine astronaut. Of course if not for me he’d be flying old ladies and puppy dogs out of the Mississippi floods, not piloting mysterious voyages to the bottom of the sea. I’ve got his balls in my pocket, and he knows it. Right, space boy?”

“You’re a funny guy.”

Gordo spoke in his usual Californian drawl, but Lily could hear the tension in his voice. In Houston, she’d got to know this stranded astronaut well enough to understand that his sudden grounding when the space program died was an open wound the size of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge itself. But this was Lammockson’s way, she’d learned that too. If you worked for him, he never missed an opportunity to exert his power over you in the most brutal way, all delivered with that hustler’s grin.

They were driving into the city now. Suburban Reykjavik looked a clean place, neat, modern in a European way, pretty little houses with brightly colored roofs, lots of concrete and glass. Occasionally she glimpsed the flat, steel-gray surface of the sea, with ice-capped mountains shouldering above the horizon. But out here the only sign of the flooding that must be afflicting this coastal port was the heavy traffic; traffic was bad all over the world, it seemed, everybody inching around the floods.

Gordo turned his head. He was good-looking in a big-boned surfer kind of way, but his neck was thick, and lines gathered around his eyes and mouth. He exuded competence. “You ever been here before, Lily? To Iceland?”

“No.”

“We’re sat right on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In fact Iceland is one of the ridge mountains, strictly speaking. So it’s a good place for Thandie Jones to be running her sea-floor-spreading surveys.”

“But it’s not just that.” Lammockson pointed out of the window to a large blocky building that sat on a low rise, topped by a glass dome from which light glimmered.“See that? I asked Gordo to bring us this way. It’s a remarkable sight in my humble, and I try to make sure everybody who comes out here takes a look. They call it ‘the Pearl.’ Geothermal water distribution tanks. Since 1930 this whole city’s taken nearly all its central heating from the heat of the Earth, the steam that just bubbles up out of the ground.”

Lily thought she saw his point.“So the city is independent of external energy sources. Oil supplies, coal.”

“Not entirely, but it could be made so,” Lammockson said.“An inexhaustible supply. Not only that, we’re sitting on an island. Defensible, see? Quite a thought, isn’t it? This is a stable point, a refuge from the flooding, a place the post-flood recovery could begin

…”

He said this briskly, businesslike, as if he was planning no more than a disaster recovery option for one of AxysCorp’s computer centers. But she had learned that this was the way he thought, as he acted: decisive, far-seeing, brutal. This Iceland operation was typical of Lammockson’s way of thinking in that it achieved multiple goals, the ocean survey work and the establishment of a possible refuge for a dismal future.

They drove back through the anonymous suburbs and headed inland once more.

“Where to now?” Lily was here to be trained to pilot Lammockson’s deep-submergence vehicle, and she’d imagined she’d be taken to the coast.

Gordo said, “We’ve established a DSV sim facility inland. Right now I’m the only pilot we’ve got; you’ll be the second, though some of the scientists can double as pilots also. We’re hoping to train up a slew more. Nathan and Thandie want to run their survey dives around the clock. It’s a two-person boat, in the current configuration, one scientist, one pilot, so we need the cover.”

“And you don’t want to tie up the one operational boat while you’re training novices.”

“That’s the idea. The sim is fairly crude, you’ll see, but it’s as good as it needs to be. Compared to flying Shuttle or Orion, the Trieste is a simple bird. More like piloting a dirigible. You’ll have no problems with it.”

“You said the Trieste?”

Nathan Lammockson looked at her, his eyebrows raised.“Name rings a bell?”

When Gary had made his invitation to join him, back in London, she had known nothing about deep diving. Since then she had done some Googling. “ Trieste was the tub that explored the Marianas Trench in the 1960s.”

Gordo said, “The boat was designed by the Swiss, bought by the US Navy in 1958, and in 1960 she reached the Challenger Deep in the Marianas, eleven thousand meters down, the deepest part of any ocean on Earth. No vessel has ever revisited the Deep. In fact no vessel constructed since has been capable of reaching such depths, manned or unmanned.”

Lily said to Lammockson,“So this Trieste is named as a tribute to that pioneer.”

“Not exactly,” Lammockson said. “Lily, she is the Trieste, the original. Or what’s become of her, in the years since.”

After her jaunt into the Challenger Deep the Trieste was retired, but her pressure sphere, the most advanced bit of engineering, was incorporated into a new DSV called the Trieste II. The new boat was used as a test vehicle for the Navy’s deep-submergence program, and qualified four “hydronauts.” Trieste kept working until 1980, when she was made obsolescent by the Alvin-class subs.

“Which everybody’s heard of, because Alvin went to the Titanic,” Lammockson said. “While they stuck the Trieste in a naval museum at Keyport, Washington.”

“And that’s about where the engineering development stopped,” Gordo said. “Last decade there was talk of replacing Alvin with a new breed of DSVs but it came to nothing.”

“And the Navy won’t even release Alvin for this project,” Lammockson said bitterly. “Nor will Woods Hole.”

Gordo said,“Woods Hole is a major oceanographic institute in Massachusetts. They operate Alvin.”

“More like ‘Arse Hole’ if you ask me,” Lammockson said.“The Russians have deep-diving submarines too, that they call Mir. Two of them touched bottom of the North Polar Ocean a few years back. But I can’t get hold of those either. I blame the Shirshov Oceanology Institute in Moscow for that.”

Lily nodded. “So you liberated the Trieste from her museum.”

Lammockson snorted. “What choice was there? There’s no time to redevelop a whole technology from scratch. The Iceland Glaciological Society is formally sponsoring us here, and God bless them. But I’ve had nothing but minimal cooperation, if you can call it cooperation at all, from agencies who should know better.” He railed about other organizations and eminent individuals who, he claimed, had done their best to impede his project. There was a widespread denial of the reality of the ocean rise, because it didn’t fit any of the old models of likely climate change, which themselves were still at the center of intense disputes.“But you just have to deal with them all,” Nathan said.

“Well, that’s what you’re good at, Nathan,” Gordo murmured.

“Yeah, I spend my life sucking off bureaucrats, lucky me. Anyhow I think we ended up with the right tub for Thandie’s work. I’m happy with the Trieste. But of course it’s not me who’s got to fly the thing. Just think,” he said, goading, “you’re getting to see the deep ocean bed, Gordo. Exploring landscapes nobody’s ever seen before. A consolation for not walking on Mars, hey?”

“You take what you can get,” Gordo said. “For sure I’d rather be doing this than working with the rest of the guys, mothballing Johnson and Canaveral, or working on the panic launches.” This was NASA-speak for a series of rapid-turnaround launches in which the inventory of vehicles at Canaveral was being fired off to Earth orbit, delivering whatever useful payload could be placed up there, mostly weather satellites and Comsats, before the launch facilities were finally lost to the flooding.

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.