There was the ruin of the Humber Bridge, two partially collapsed towers, steel, wire and concrete protruding from mudflats. Then there was Hull, the old port overrun with the brown waters of the Humber, not deep enough to cover it, just enough to turn it into an ugly mudlike industrial Venice that nobody wanted.
The submarine had broken the surface and we were walking along the deck to a rickety-looking, plastic-hulled water taxi that, despite the calm water, still looked like it was being too ambitious coming out this far. Morag and I clambered into the unsteady craft and waved at the Russian sub captain, who just glared at us. She knew we were going to cause her trouble. The boat headed away from the sub, towards the east of the city.
If our boatman thought anything strange about his human cargo and their manner of arrival he didn’t say anything; perhaps he did this all the time. Then again perhaps he didn’t say much at all. He was old and quiet, his face craggy and impassive. He seemed to show no sign of cybernetics (possibly he was old enough to have avoided the draft); his clothes were warm and well looked after, if somewhat threadbare.
The old man piloted us through abandoned half-submerged docks. Through streets of deserted factories, probably abandoned years before the waters rose, a testament to a very distant past. Everything was eerily still. The only sound was the gentle lapping of the waters. This was the ghost of a city long gone. It was hard to believe that anyone lived here at all, but then that was the thing about Hulclass="underline" it gave you a chance to opt out if you didn’t like the way things were going. Come to Hull and you got left alone because nobody wanted it.
We floated underneath the support of an old bridge, its road surface now under the water. We passed an old commercial section and on to what must have once been quite a wide road. Either side of it was a mixture of shops and housing. Now it was all deserted of course. Or almost deserted; on my thermographics I could see human-sized heat sources here and there. Presumably pickets for the Avenues. I didn’t see the point in saying anything. The boatman wasn’t talking and probably knew about them and all it would’ve done was make Morag uneasier.
We headed down the turgid brown water in this wide street for just over a mile and turned right into another similarly wide road, the ghosts of bars and shops on either side. Morag grabbed me by the arm. The people watching us were becoming more obvious.
‘I know,’ I said quietly. The boatman’s craggy face was as impassive as ever. Ahead of us I could see something stretched across the channel/street. I magnified my vision and made out a net of vicious-looking spiked chains stretched across the water, blocking our way. On the right-hand side the chain disappeared into a house that presumably contained some kind of winch mechanism. On the left was a building that looked like an old hotel or apartment complex. Sticking out of that building from a hole cut in the first-floor wall was a rickety-looking jetty.
‘Is this the Avenues?’ Morag asked. The boatman inclined his head once, signalling affirmative. There were figures moving all around the area. Many of them seemed to be going about their everyday lives but a fair few were taking an interest in our little boat.
Off to my right, behind the chain, I could make out an area of open water, broken where stumps of dead trees breached the surface. The water looked cleaner there and it seemed to have been cordoned off with some thin plastic material that formed a wall to keep the dirty water of the Humber out. I assumed it was some kind of farm for fish or maybe kelp.
To the left I could see a water-filled road lined with partially submerged terraced houses. An ancient, battered and rusty sign on the end house read ‘Marlborough Avenue’.
The boatman brought the boat to a halt about ten feet away from the jetty. Stood on it was a kid probably not much older than Morag. He had bad skin, a haircut that looked like someone had torn chunks out of his scalp, a badly decorated armoured leather jacket and a powerful hunting carbine that may have been older than the boatman. There was no sign of any cybernetics on him that I could see. He was unaugmented and judging by his age, a draft dodger. Good for you kid, I thought, best of luck. Up until he pointed the carbine at me. I wondered if there was a place you could go and not get guns pointed at you.
‘That’s close enough,’ he said somewhat predictably. ‘What do you want?’ I decided to let him have some time staring at my polarised lenses.
‘We’re here to see Pagan,’ I finally said.
‘What about?’ Now to be fair to him he may have just been doing his job or he may have been bored, but it seemed to me that I had put a lot of time and effort into getting this far and I couldn’t be bothered with this crap any more.
‘Just go and get him will you?’ I told him brusquely. The kid smiled.
‘No,’ he said slowly, as if talking to someone a bit slow. ‘I said-’
‘I heard what you fucking said, kid. Look, we could have some kind of alpha male competition here that I win because I’m more violent, and then you feel humiliated and have to go and do the thing that I’ve asked you to do anyway. Just fucking tell Pagan I’m here and let him do the thinking for you,’ I told him irritably.
‘Good conflict resolution skills,’ Morag muttered. I thought about the conflict resolution skills I’d learnt at Hereford. I wondered why so many people feel they have to force you to hurt them in order to just get them to be reasonable. Do they think courtesy to a stranger is a sign of weakness? Sadly, maybe it was. To the kid’s credit he didn’t look flustered; in fact he lowered his carbine.
All I really saw were teeth, big sharp-looking steel teeth. I was vaguely aware of the hugeness of the mouth that had broken the water and the power-assisted nature of its jaws. I heard the resounding snap as its jaws slammed shut in a demonstration of power inches away from our boat, showering us all in the brown muck of the Humber. I instinctively scrambled away from it, as did Morag. The boatman tried to make sure we didn’t capsize the craft.
‘Fucking dinosaur!’ I screamed, dragging my pistols free of their holsters. Morag looked shaken; I was too busy with my own panic to register if she’d screamed. The cybernetically augmented alligator, which was so large it had presumably grown up on a steady diet of growth hormones, sank beneath the brown water with the sort of disgruntled dignity of a predator denied its prey.
‘Vicar sent us to see Pagan. Just tell him Vicar sent us, please!’ Morag said to the kid. Many of the people on the Avenues side of the chain who had been watching us were laughing now. I suspected this son of thing had happened before. The kid was speaking to another armed man back in the old hotel on the corner of Marlborough Avenue. Then he turned back to face us.
‘I know it may be galling for you to be questioned by someone of my age, but I live here, so when you come to visit, behave or you will get eaten.’ This kid may not be quite the punk I’d taken him for.
‘It’s a fucking dinosaur,’ I managed again. I watched nervously as another armoured reptilian back broke the surface of the water. There was more than one of those things. The other man nodded to the kid, who turned back to us.
‘Okay, you can come in, but try not to behave like wankers, okay?’ Morag nodded and smiled. I glared resentfully for a bit and nodded. It was going to take a little while for my bravado to return after my run-in with the alligator. It didn’t seem to matter how well trained you are, or how much cybernetics you have, I reckoned, at some level humans are just scared of big lizards. We clambered onto the jetty.