Free Flood by Stephen Baxter Page B

walls, and on either bank a dark stain spread over the roads and gardens and parks.
    Thandie called back, “You getting this, Sanj?”
    Sanjay was using a joystick to control the camera slung beneath the chopper’s body. “Pretty good,” he reported.
    “We’re feeding the rolling news channels . . .”
    The flood reached the petrochemical refineries and storage tanks. The water spread around the feet of the huge structures, looking as black and viscous as the oil that was processed there. Some lights failed, and a few abandoned cars were quickly submerged. The depth of the water must be increasing rapidly.
    And now the flood started to spill over the housing estates. Thandie swooped lower so they could see. The rushing waters poured onto access roads still crowded with cars. Vehicles were overwhelmed, their lights flickering and dying. People scrambled out of their cars through windows and doors, and climbed onto the cars’ roofs, or tried to wade through the rising water. The current shoved the cars themselves, piling them into the fleeing people like logs.
    All this Gary saw from above, from the warmth and comfort of his helicopter cabin. There was no human noise, no screams or cries; it was all drowned by the storm’s roar and the thrum of the chopper’s engine. Suddenly this was no longer just a stunt weather event, a puzzle for climate modelers. “Christ,” he said, “there’s a disaster going on down there.”
    “The whole damn day is already a disaster,” Thandie said. “Let’s just do our job.”
    The chopper roared up into the air and headed west. The flooded estate was reduced to an abstraction, a mélange of water and land.

12

    P ursuing the storm front up the river toward central London, the chopper flew over Tilbury, ten or twelve kilometers west of Canvey Island. There was a much more massive evacuation project going on from this heavily populated area, with traffic edging out of Tilbury to the north of the Thames and Gravesend to the south. Electricity substations were overwhelmed. The lighting in whole districts started to blank out. In the river itself a container ship had been caught, apparently as it tried to turn, and had pitched over, spilling containers into the water like matchsticks. That alone was a major rescue operation, Gary saw, with helicopters and what looked like lifeboats clustering around the stricken ship.
    The chopper flew on.
    “We need to understand this,” Thandie murmured. “Understand it, and do something about it.”
    “Mean sea levels are up by a meter,” Gary said.
    Thandie turned. “Who told you that?”
    “It came from an eleven-year-old.”
    Thandie grunted. “Well, she might be right.”
    “It was a she, actually.”
    “Of course it was.”
    “Nobody knows for sure,” Sanjay said. “Trends are hard to establish. What we’ve actually seen are exceptional fluvial events, and exceptional incidences of tidal flooding, like this event. All over the planet. Ocean temperatures are rising too. The additional heat is fueling storms.”
    “Like this one.”
    “Possibly. The data’s patchy.”
    Gary asked Thandie, “What do you think?”
    “That the oceans are rising. The data might be patchy, Sanjay, but everything points that way. The secular trend will become apparent with time.”
    “So how is this happening? A meter is a hell of a lot. When I was abducted that was an upper limit for the sea-level rise quoted for the end of the century, not for 2016.”
    “I remember it well,” Thandie said dryly. “The good old days of global warming.”
    “So what’s the cause? You say it’s not just glacier melting, the ice caps, or the heat expansion of the water itself.”
    “All that’s going on, as it has been for decades,” Thandie said. “But this is something else.”
    Sanjay said,“It’s an argument that’s been raging for a couple of years. And Thandie has some hypotheses—haven’t you, my dear?”
    “Don’t patronize me, you smug Brit