Chapter 1

 

The deep-sea submersible Melvin had just reached its planned exploration depth – 1,559 metres below the surface of the Tasman Sea and 4.2 metres off the bottom of the eastern flank of the Lord Howe Rise – when the underwater telephone belched. The mother ship was trying to contact them but, like every other bit of technology except that used for spying on people, the phone was decades past its use-by date.

Irith Hardey didn't move from the viewport; if she had, claustrophobia would have overcome her. Besides, she'd been waiting two years for this dive and no intrusion from the dismal world above was going to distract her. Her research was her life, her friend, her lover and comforter. It couldn't turn her mind off after she collapsed into bed, though. It couldn't keep the recurring nightmares at bay.

The submersible's floodlights illuminated grey mud between the knobs of tubeworm-encrusted basalt. A white fish swam by, long and thin, like a length of squashed plastic pipe.

'It's for you, Dr Hardey,' said Fred, the pilot.

Irith swore. 'What now? We only left the surface an hour ago.'

Fred passed her the receiver. 'It's Jacques Cuvier.' The expedition leader, on the RV Thor Heyerdahl, above.

'It'd better be important!' She took it. 'Hello, Irith here.'

Jacques came on the line, his normally precise tones made adenoidal by the ancient instrument. 'You are to come up, please.'

'Is it an emergency?' Hardly likely, or the surface controller would be talking the pilot through it.

'No. Come up at once.'

Irith's co-observer, Jason Slythe, spun around. 'What's the matter?'

She put her hand over the mouthpiece. 'Surely he can't mean now? I've been waiting years for this.' Not to mention writing fifty-three research proposals, and begging and scrounging every cent of the $65,000 per day it cost for the sixty-year-old submersible, all her equipment and the rusting seventy-metre research vessel required to support it.

Jason shrugged. She put the phone to her ear again.

Jacques said something she didn't catch as the phone gurgled like a toilet flushing. The underwater phone was always causing trouble; there had been no money for maintenance in decades. It gave her an idea.

'Hello?' she said loudly. 'Jacques? Jacques?'

'Lost him,' she said to Fred, the pilot, then covered the mouthpiece again. 'Go down to Station One, Fred.'

He adjusted the trim by pumping mercury from the aft tank to the forward one. 'But …'

'Jacques hasn't told you to come up.'

'No.'

'And it's not an emergency.'

He grinned. Fred was the dependable type, as pilots had to be, but there was enough rebel in him to enjoy someone else breaking the rules.

Irith put the receiver into an empty Milo tin used for storing odds and ends, and taped the lid on over the cord. 'I couldn't make out what he was saying, so we go on with the mission.'

'You're going to be in the shit when we surface,' Jason fretted. He was the worrying type.

'You don't have to worry. You're not in charge.'

The Melvin proceeded downslope to 1,642 metres, keeping above the bottom so the wash from the thrusters did not stir up the mud. Irith watched the echo sounder with one eye while using the external video and still cameras with the other. 'We must be nearly on station, Fred.'

'The canyon should come into view any minute. There it is.'

'Ease down into it so I can photograph the walls.'

The Melvin dropped into a gully eroded out of clayey sediment. The lights revealed wavy layering in the walls, dark and light, and occasional lenses of white.

'I knew we'd find it here,' Irith said. 'The hydrate signature was as strong as I've ever seen.'

Further down, the brown sediment was thickly layered with glistening bands of the white material. It looked exactly like ice.

'Follow it down,' she added. 'I want to ground-truth the traces as best we can. Is everything recording?'

'Of course,' Fred said.

The white bands continued to the bottom of the canyon, twenty-seven metres below the sediment surface. The submersible tracked along the bottom for about two hundred metres, then hovered, neutrally buoyant, while Irith tested the water chemistry with her external instruments. She checked that the data was recording, took water samples and sediment cores with the manipulator arms, and stored the sealed containers in the science sample basket outside.

'I'm finished here. Can we track back along the other side?'

Fred was rocking on his seat, gnawing his lower lip.

'Something the matter?' she said.

'The canyon walls don't look one-hundred-percent stable, Irith, and the operating regs specify –'

'Of course,' she said. At the bottom of the sea, safety always took precedence. 'Take her up whenever you're ready. I've done everything here I have to do.'

Back at the place where they'd first seen the white material, Fred worked the manipulator arms to break off a chunk of layered sediment and put it in the pressure chamber within the sample basket.

'Enough?'

'Another piece, please,' said Irith. 'Since we've come all this way.'

That proved more difficult than she had anticipated. As soon as Fred closed the grips of the starboard manipulator arm, the white material decomposed in a little explosion of bubbles.

'I've read about that,' said Irith. 'What about just there?' She pointed over Fred's shoulder through his viewport at another icy lens.

He sampled it and worked the remotes to seal the lid of the pressure chamber. It would keep the samples at the same pressure and temperature until they reached the surface.

'Excellent,' Irith said. 'Now, if we can just get a core or two.'

Fred used the sediment corer to extract a two-metre-long horizontal core through the white material, then a vertical core from the top.

'Where to now?' Fred's stare suggested that it was time to obey orders.

Irith heaved a heavy sigh. 'I love it down here. No one has ever dived on the Lord Howe Rise before – it could be a new planet for all we know about it.'

'It'll change If they find a use for that stuff.'

'Methane hydrate,' she said absently. 'Methane gas formed in the sediments over millions of years and frozen into ice crystals. There's billions of tonnes of it here.'

'And it's a greenhouse menace,' said Jason.

'See that?' said Fred. Trails of tiny bubbles were streaming up from the exposed hydrate surfaces. 'It's two degrees outside, yet our lights are making it break down. Let's go.'

'All right.' Irith removed the tape from the Milo lid. 'Hello, Jacques,' she said wearily, as though she'd been calling for hours. 'Melvin here, come in please.'

'Dr Hardey!' Jacques Cuvier snapped. 'Come up immediately.'

'We're on our way. But why?' The weather had been good when they'd left the surface, and the cyclone season didn't start for months.

'Someone wants to see you urgently.'

'Me? Why?'

'The Department hasn't bothered to inform me.'

'Is someone flying out?'

Irith could not imagine why. Plenty of scientists were doing similar research on climate change to hers, and most had more experience than she did.

'They're sending a helicopter to take you back to Sydney, and it'll be here in half an hour. You'd better not keep them waiting.'

'Pick me up? Where am I going?'

'I have no idea, Dr Hardey, but whatever you've done, I'm not happy about it. This mission has been years in the planning, and it's most inconvenient.'

'It's a damn sight more inconvenient for me! It's my research time that's being lost.' She told Fred to ascend to the mother ship.

'What the fuck's going on?' said Jason, as if it were her fault. His precious underwater time was also being wasted. 'This is a real pain, Irith.'

'It certainly wasn't my idea,' she snapped.

*

At 11 am, she wriggled out of the hatch of the Melvin and climbed down onto the deck of the Thor Heyerdahl. A huge helicopter sat on the pad on the forward deck, its blades spinning. It was an ancient, two-bladed Sikorsky, kept running long past its designed life. There were oil stains down the metal skin, which had been repaired using parts from a machine with a different paint job. It wasn't a comforting sign.

Jacques Cuvier marched across, natty in suit and bow tie. He looked out of place among the casually clothed scientists and technicians.

'Come on, Irith,' he fussed. 'The Department's been on the line three times in the last half hour, wanting to know why you're taking so long. They have power over our funding, you know.'

Irith had asked Fred to come up as slowly as possible, making the most of the time she had left. Jacques must have known what she was up to, since the mother ship's sonar logs could locate the Melvin to within a few metres, but he merely took her elbow and ushered her towards the helicopter.

'How long will I be away?' she said.

'I don't know. Days, certainly …'

'What is it?'

'The helicopter costs $8,000 an hour and it's well overdue for an overhaul. They may not bring you back at all.'

'But my research …'

'We've got the plan. It'll get done.'

'It's not the same, Jacques!' she said furiously.

He took two steps backwards. 'I do understand. I've done my best but the Department wouldn't budge. The order comes from higher up.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'The Department wouldn't say.'

'Well, fuck the Department,' Irith muttered. She rarely swore but the situation seemed to require it.

'Pardon?'

'I'll have to pack.'

'There's no time. You'll have to go as you are.'

'What's the hurry?' She looked up at him. Jacques wasn't a tall man but he was a lot taller than her.

He jerked at her arm, uncharacteristically anxious. The Departmental Secretary must have given him a roasting. Serves him right, Irith thought, but that was unjust. Jacques was a fussy little man but he knew talent when he saw it and he'd always supported her.

'I'm bursting for a pee,' said Irith. 'And I've got to change my tampon before it leaks all down –' That was a fib, but in these prudish times no one talked about such things, least of all Jacques Cuvier.

'Five minutes!' he interrupted hastily, avoiding her eye.

'Not a second more.'

Irith ran.

In her cabin she threw off her overalls and put on the best pants she had here, a pair of jeans that were uncomfortably tight across the backside. Must get back into exercising, she thought. Brown boots, a grey blouse and a cotton jacket that made her look like a bushwalker. Irith gave her cropped brown hair a quick brush, which failed to tame it, and her teeth an even quicker going-over, by which time Jacques was rapping on the door.

'Coming!' She threw a spare blouse into her backpack, a couple of changes of underwear, passport and ID cards and, lastly, her battered PocketBook computer. If she wasn't coming back, at least she could get some work done.

In another five minutes Jacques was handing her into the chopper which, she noted, had been fitted with long-range tanks. The Thor Heyerdahl was over a thousand kilometres out from Sydney.

'Good luck!' he said as the co-pilot pointed to the rear left seat and slid the door closed.

'Thanks,' she muttered inaudibly.

*

Three hours later she was in Sydney, but no wiser. A car was waiting at the heliport. A uniformed woman checked Irith's ID with a portable terminal that she took directly from the manufacturer's packaging. In a world dominated by refugee-sponsored terrorism, the security services had the best of everything.

'Would you come this way, please, Dr Hardey?'

'I'd like to know what's going on,' said Irith.

'You'll be briefed on arrival in London.'

'London!'

'That's right. Let me take your bag.'

Irith held onto it. 'It's not heavy. What's happening in London?'

'I don't know.'

Irith shivered, for it reminded her of her first trip to London, eight or nine years ago, and the subsequent horrors. A blood-drenched hunt through flooded tunnels under the London Docklands, an insurgency school in mosquito-ridden Minnesota, and then … Seeing the faces of all her dead friends and foes, she took deep breaths and bit down on the memories.

 

 

Chapter 2

 

At the international terminal, Irith was taken through Customs and Immigration and led into the business class section of a Qantas flight. The hatch was closed immediately, as if the flight had been held up for her.

Since she had trouble sleeping on planes, she worked for the first half of the trip and watched a series of indifferent movies for the rest. She normally avoided watching the news, which was a repetitive catalogue of human misery – the same crises in the same countries that she'd been seeing all her life.

However a few hours out of London she flicked to NetNews and was drawn in by a documentary on the Bangladeshi refugee camps, which now stretched for sixty-five kilometres along that unfortunate country's border with India. Three-quarters of Bangladesh had been flooded by the six-metre sea-level rise when the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsed, and most of its best agricultural land was now under the sea.

Half the population of Bangladesh was rendered homeless. The border camps had amalgamated to form a mega-city housing upwards of seventy-five million people, the most overcrowded, polluted and dismal slum in the world. The refugees had no homeland to go to, and no country would take them in. Twenty years after the ice sheet had melted – a disaster that Irith's father had forecast before she was born – the camps were an incubator of hate, misery and the worst excesses of terrorism that the twenty-first-century mind could come up with.

And not only Bangladesh. The rising seas had displaced another hundred million in India and Pakistan, two hundred and twenty-five million in China and fifty million in Egypt when the lower Nile valley became an estuary two hundred kilometres long. No country with a coastline had been unaffected: thousands of homes had been flooded on Sydney Harbour, the sea was only kept out of London by the immense Thames Dike, and Venice was just a watery memory.

Refugees had been streaming into Europe, the Americas and Australia for two decades, but in the past three years the flood had become an unstoppable deluge. The developed countries were bursting at the seams and, with unemployment approaching Great Depression levels, even the most tolerant nations had had enough.

Irith hastily flicked away from the images of thin brown faces and pot-bellied children with staring eyes. The problem was insoluble; there was nowhere else for them to go.

The refugee crisis grows ever worse, and ever louder the clamour of those who want to send them back where they came from. In Berlin yesterday, an anti-refugee rally drew three-quarters of a million Yellow Armbands.

In the background, footage of the rally was replaced by black-and-white film of the Nuremberg rallies. The parallel didn't need to be drawn.

In other news, the Minister for Rationing announced that food rationing will have to be tightened in Britain before the end of the month, due to the continuing bad weather which has led to the worst harvest in eighty-eight years.

In the United States, the Department of Agriculture has downgraded its forecast grain tonnages for the fourth time in a month. The US may have to import grain for the first time in more than three centuries. Wheat, corn, barley and oat futures are at the highest levels ever recorded.

In London, after Customs and Immigration, Irith was taken to the VIP Rationing Centre and issued with a ration smartcard.

'You must present this with every purchase,' said the bored woman behind the counter.

'What if I run out of points?' said Irith.

'You won't be able to make any purchases until the fifteenth of the month, when the next month's food and energy points are awarded.'

'Energy points?'

'For anything that needs energy! Lifts, taxis, buses, trains, heaters, household appliances –'

'I get the picture,' said Irith. 'So if I have no energy points left, I have to walk.'

'You learn fast. The card also contains your water ration points.'

'What about air?' Irith said sarcastically. 'Are there ration points for breathing too?'

'Air is free,' the woman said. She looked over her shoulder and added, with a faint smile, 'the air quality we have in London, it'd want to be.'

Irith was ushered to a limousine. She presented her ration card to the driver but he waved it away.

'This one is taken care of.'

The limousine turned out of Heathrow towards the city. Shortly, trapped in a snarl of traffic, Irith noticed a line of ragged people standing just off the road. Shabbily dressed and gaunt, they carried hand-printed signs: WILL WORK FOR FOOD. They did not look like refugees.

Irith wondered if they were making a movie, though she could not see any cameras.

A woman carrying a tiny, thin baby approached the car, holding out her hands. Irith, moved, pressed the down button on her window before realising that she had no English money. The driver, a thin-faced black man with a close-cropped steel-grey beard and a shaven head, wound her window up again. The woman began beating on the glass. She couldn't have been more than twenty but was emaciated and had lost half her teeth. Irith was profoundly shocked.

'Open the window, please,' she said to the driver, taking off her watch. It was the only thing she had to offer.

'Don't encourage them, lady. It doesn't do anyone any good.'

The car jerked forward and the woman fell to her knees beside the road. Irith watched her out the rear window until they turned the corner. 'Why did you do that?'

'You don't know what you're doing,' he said politely, though his jaw muscles were clenched. 'Open the door and twenty of them would tear you out of the car and strip you of everything you own. They're not human.'

'But they looked desperate. Who were they?'

'Reffoes! Someone should do something about them. They've got no right to come here, eating our food and taking our jobs.'

Irith was too exhausted to respond. Closing her eyes, she endured the endless journey, longing for her own comfortable bed.

She was dozing when the car screeched to a halt in a line of cars. The street was narrow, several shopfront windows had been smashed and the pavement was littered with timber, glass and rubble.

The driver swore. A small group of people were pelting towards the limousine, only hundred metres ahead of a mob. It was dark now and half the streetlights were out. A shiver passed up her spine.

'What is it, driver?'

He looked over his shoulder, gauging the space behind the limousine. His forehead was coated with perspiration. 'It's a BFB rally. Don't know what's happened – this way was supposed to be safe.'

'BFB?'

'Britain for the British. They want to get rid of the refugees, and all foreigners.'

Irith tried to digest that. 'What's your name?'

'Nigel, lady,' he said after a pause.

The name seemed incongruous. 'Could you open the window, please? I can't breathe.'

He unlocked it and she wound it down. The traffic behind the limousine hemmed them in; the car ahead had stalled and would not start. Nigel reversed until the bumper touched the car behind. He revved the engine, pushing the other vehicle backwards until it touched the car behind it. Its driver's invective was barely audible above the roar of the mob.

'What are you doing?' Irith said.

'You know what they're like, Marm.' He eased forward, then back again, but still lacked clearance to swing the big vehicle out of the line of cars. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck.

'I've only been in the country a couple of hours.'

'It's a rally against foreigners. If they catch me, I'm done for.'

'You don't sound like a refugee.'

'I'm fourth-generation British, but if your skin's the wrong colour, or you talk funny, they go for you. You're not safe either. Australian?'

'Yes,' she said faintly. How had everything got out of control so quickly? It reminded her of the bad old days before the Global Congress had been toppled, eight years ago. That bloody time still gave her nightmares. She'd been idealistic then; now she felt world-weary and helpless.

On the other side of the two-lane road, a line of stalled traffic prevented the driver from making a u-turn, though there was a small gap a car length behind them.

Nigel spun the wheel onto full lock, slammed the vehicle into reverse and stamped on the accelerator. The tyres smoked and the long vehicle shot round in a tight curve, just clearing the car behind. The rear wheels mounted the kerb, bounced over an obstacle and crashed down.

He cursed, banged the gear selector into first and lurched forwards, but the wheels hit the obstacle and stopped, the tyres screaming

Irith tried to open the door.

'Sit tight, please, Marm. We're not done yet.' He kept going forward and back until the reek of the overheated clutch merged with the smells of sweat and burning rubber.

The mob pulled down one of the fleeing stragglers, a short, tubby man. Clubs rose and fell, and only then did Irith understand her own peril.

'They're killing him!' she gasped. Her throat felt as if it had closed over. This couldn't be happening. 'Can't you do something …?' Stupid, stupid. 'Call the police.'

'They won't come. They keep well clear of BFB rallies.'

'But …'

'It's happening all over the country, Marm.'

Two more people were clubbed down. Irith put her knuckles in her mouth to prevent herself from screaming.

The mob engulfed the fleeing group, one by one. Those further back began smashing shopfront windows and passing goods out, but the leaders kept coming, advancing in a deadly surge. The motorists ahead of the limousine were abandoning their cars and running for their lives.

Nigel kept jerking back, then forwards. Metal screeched under the car but the wheels did not clear the obstacle.

The mob was now near enough for Irith to make out individuals brandishing cricket bats and pieces of pipe. All were dressed alike in shiny black boots, brown workmen's garb, and had stubbled heads. Each wore a broad yellow armband, half the length of a sleeve, with a device in red on it.

Only three of the fleeing group remained on their feet: a middle-aged man and woman, and a girl in her late teens, all of Indian appearance. The leaders of the mob were closing on them rapidly. Irith couldn't bear to watch. She groped for the door handle.

'Stay put!' Nigel snapped. 'Please, Marm.'

He was still jerking the car forward and back. Irith put her head out the window. The obstacle was a concrete beam, broken on one end to expose the steel reinforcing.

The running man stopped suddenly and faced the mob. He was stout and bald, an unlikely hero. The older woman extended her arms toward him, begging him to keep going. He thrust her and the girl behind him, urging them away, then picked up a length of timber and walked towards the mob. Its members all looked Caucasian.

The older woman ran after him. She took his free hand and they stood together, calmly facing the rabble.

The girl wailed, then turned and bolted down the middle of the street, between the lines of stationary cars. The mob hesitated for a minute, but came on. The bald man awkwardly swung his length of four-by-two, then let it fall and stood there with his hands outstretched. The leaders of the mob raised their clubs and lengths of pipe. The man and woman were struck down.

Nigel dropped the clutch and, with a rending of metal, as if the muffler had torn off, the rear wheels spun over the obstacle. The limousine skidded round in a semi-circle, through the gap in the other lane and onto the pavement on the other side of the narrow street. It was littered with broken concrete, so he had to reverse again.

Irith had her window down and her head out. The girl was running for her life but the mob would have her before she got another fifty metres. Without thinking, Irith threw the door open and screamed, 'This way!'

'Shut the fucking door or we're both dead,' roared the driver, rocketing backwards.

The girl altered course towards them but she wasn't going to make it. One of the leaders, a black-booted skinhead, was swinging a length of metal railing above his head, preparing to bring her down. The large device on his arm was like a triplet of whirling red sickles.

A long time ago, Irith had been trained in violence by an expert. As the limousine stopped she leapt out, snatched up a piece of pipe lying on the pavement and sent it spinning straight towards the leading man.

It caught him in the mouth, scattering teeth like corn from a cob and taking down the thugs behind him as well. The crowd hesitated for a second. Irith heaved the girl into the car and leapt in after her.

The mob let out a roar and Nigel took off, the vehicle smashing an upturned office chair to pieces. Irith reached for the open door but it struck a pole and tore away.

The limousine rounded the corner, still on the pavement, turned into a wider road and shot away. Irith let go of the girl, who might have been eighteen. She had a small, heart-shaped face, great moist eyes like glazed chocolate, and windblown black hair.

'I'm sorry,' Irith said, knowing that the words were hopelessly inadequate. 'Were they your parents …?'

'My uncle and aunt,' the girl said, formally. 'I thank you for your courage and your kindness. They … they would thank you too.'

The car stopped at a set of traffic lights and, before Irith knew it, the girl had pressed something into her hand and slipped out the gaping door hole. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It's all I have.' Within seconds she had vanished into the crowd.