Free Flood by Stephen Baxter

what else don’t I know? You got a man in your life these days, Thandie? Is there a Mister Jones?”
    Thandie hesitated. Sanjay glanced over at him, then looked down at his displays.
    Thandie said, “I guess you didn’t hear about that.”
    “About what?”
    “I met this guy.Dot-com entrepreneur who was interested in marketing personalized weather forecasting. Not the dumbest idea in the world. You’d base it on public-domain wide-area models, supplemented by a sensor suite that would track the micro-climate in the customer’s vicinity and anticipated route—”
    “Thandie. The guy?”
    “Yeah. To cut a long story, we got married. Your mother was there—your ambassador, I guess. I got pregnant. Lost the kid. Then lost the guy, or we lost each other.”
    He was shocked by the suddenness of the telling.“Oh. I’m sorry. You didn’t want to try again?”
    “That turned out not to be an option,” she said crisply. “Not for me. The doctors—hell, it doesn’t matter now.”
    “Christ,Thandie, what a terrible thing.”
    “It’s just life. We all go through these changes. Births, deaths, whatever. It was just a road not taken.” She sat rigid amid the buffeting of the flight.
    Sanjay tapped Gary on the shoulder.“Myself, I have two children, by two marriages. One child in Glasgow is mostly Scottish. The other in Middlesex is mostly Bengali. Life is always complicated, my friend.”
    “So it is. But—” But Gary had known a different Thandie before, a wild, reckless, exuberant, imaginative Thandie. He wondered if he would ever be able to get to know this new, damaged person.“It’s a tragedy that I’ve been away so long.”
    Sanjay said, “A tragedy for you, your family and your friends. You must resent what was done to you.”
    “Hell, yes.” More and more as the days went by, in fact. Maybe he’d got too used to his captors, or even fond of them, or some damn Stockholm-syndrome thing. Domesticated by his long captivity. Now he was out and going through some other process; now he hated them.
    But the chopper dipped, and he was reminded that the world was going through its own novel processes, which had no patience for the revolutions in his head.

    The chopper swooped over a peninsula that jutted out from the north bank of the river, incised by a deep brook. Industrial facilities sprawled across both sides of the brook, oil storage tanks and refineries and chimney stacks and big gas storage vessels, all embedded in a web of walkways and pipelines. One big line strode overhead across the brook itself.
    Gary asked, “Where are we? What is that?”
    “Canvey Island,” Thandie called.“And to the west of the creek, that’s Coryton. Petrochemical installations.”
    The terminals were serviced from the river. One immense supertanker huddled against a jetty, with the compact shapes of tugs nearby. Brightly lit, a carpet of sodium light, this landscape looked as if it went on for kilometers, and Gary could see it had some protection from the water in the shape of a stout concrete sea wall that had to be meters high. But the land wasn’t entirely given over to industry. There were estates of houses down there, clusters of brick red like scrubby flowers huddling in the rain, some of them only a half-kilometer, less, from the industrial plant.
    And there was clearly an evacuation underway. Gary saw cars streaming out of the housing estates, crowding the roads that fed into the big arterial routes to the north. It was so dark now, though it wasn’t yet four in the afternoon, that most of the cars had their lights on. The traffic, however, was all but motionless, and helicopters, bright yellow search-and-rescue machines, prowled along the riverbank. Gary saw all this in glimpses through sheeting rain, from a chopper that bucked and rolled in the wind. He heard Thandie talking to some kind of air traffic control.
    And now there was a spark of lightning, a crackle of thunder.
    “The storm front’s only a