The Forge: Fire and Ice

THE DESPOILERS Dominic Bell

The sun was warm and I unzipped my thermal jacket as I glanced up at the brightness of it. It was still welcome after the three long years of its absence, years when it had lain hidden behind the dark clouds of smoke and dust. But today the sky was clear; a bright blue, an arctic blue. A couple of miles away the coast of Gabon with its dead forests was easily visible. Once low, it now it stood up high from the water on freshly cut cliffs. I had walked amongst the gaunt dead trees a fortnight back, walked there with Jess, and we had seen a few precious shoots of green. But not many. And they would probably be snuffed out all too soon. If we failed.

Around me the sea was littered with ships that had gathered here. Around our cluster of drillships were large and brightly coloured cruise ships, tankers and supply vessels, but further out a line of grey warships kept away the little vessels that constantly tried to reach us, to impede our mission. They could not be allowed to do that. Greens, religious fanatics, locals who believed it would not get any worse than this; that this last enclave would somehow survive. There was a distant popping, then a low boom. Smoke rose from one of the frigates. Probably a suicide boat. There had been a couple of them. Another irreplaceable ship damaged, possibly lost.

Helicopters roared over from the big carrier behind us, and then our ship slowly got underway. The protesters had been warned to move or be sunk. Some, mainly the local boats, turned away towards the shore. They were allowed to go. The gunships started to fire warning shots at the rest.

We were finally on the move. And still I had nothing to do but spectate. My job would not truly be starting for weeks, if not months. I did not mind. It was pleasant standing in the sun with Jess, and deaths did not affect us any more really. There had been so many that a handful more did not seem to matter. Jess looked as emotionless as I felt as she watched the unequal battle, but she held out her hand and I took it, squeezed it.

Sharp cracks came from a different direction, somewhere onshore, a few mortar splashes rising amongst the ships until they abruptly stopped after a series of dull thuds. Counter fire by the marines ashore. The protesters would have hidden them in one of the refugee camps again, and there would be more casualties as the shells silenced them. But that might ironically be a good thing. Food was getting harder and harder to find, and a lot of it was on board our ships now, for this, the final throw of the dice. Those left would have to live frugally. Food was the only thing that mattered now, the only currency. And the military guarded the stocks and the greenhouses, the new farms that had been scratched in the dead jungle. I had no real idea of how many people were left, but I knew it was less than a million. Maybe less than half a million. It seemed crazy that even now people could not stop fighting, could not stop killing each other.

We followed our division leader, a Russian destroyer, behind which trailed a French nuclear sub. She would be taking over the lead soon enough. Behind us came supply ships and tankers, more drillships, and a cruise ship, stained and rusted; and after them more military ships guarding our most important assets, the great ice breakers. Only a handful of them, sadly, but enough.

The boats of the protesters made a last great effort, surging forward. I looked away as the gunships opened up in earnest. It was not playtime any more. All would perish if this, the last throw of a dice weighted against us, did not work. We broke through, sailing past pieces of boats, past fragments of what had been men and women. A placard floated in the water and I read it.

‘Thou shalt not flout the Will of God.’

Maybe the protesters had been right, maybe this was all God’s will, but if there was an all-powerful God then he was the one who had sent the asteroid in the first place. He had been the one who had stopped the nuclear weapons deflecting it, had let them instead worsen the problem by splitting it into a great core with a hundred great fragments escorting it in. He had let the main fragment impact in the South China Sea so that the world shook and erupted and burned. He had let the lesser fragments rain down across the northern hemisphere. Gigadeaths from the impacts, gigadeaths from the tsunamis and earthquakes and eruptions that they had triggered, gigadeaths from the great fires started as the sky had turned red, raining down red-hot debris that had ignited the cities and fields and forests, until the orbiting debris from the impacts combined with the smoke from the burnings to shut out the sun itself. If God did that, or even stood by and let it happen, if he then allowed all but a pitiful handful of the survivors of catastrophe to die slowly in the dark as the world chilled, as the ice sheets spread out from the poles, as the glaciers advanced from the mountains, then it was no longer humanity’s duty to obey him. Or so thought most. Others believed that they had been chosen to survive, talked of a new Eden, of a great purification. Yeah, right. If a god can do that I want nothing to do with him.

The darkness had slowly faded from jet black to an evil grey, and one day we had seen the sun again. That had been a good day, an amazing day even. And eventually aircraft had taken off to see what was left, for the nukes had destroyed the satellites that survived the asteroid fragments, but all they found was frozen seas and the ice sheets. Rapidly advancing ice sheets. Advancing into Africa from north and south, driving the few survivors before them. There should have been people in Central America as well, but if there were we never heard from them. I guess they were too close to the epicentre of the impact, the focus of the shock waves. We sent a plane over to look and the whole geography of the area had changed; the Andes a line of erupting volcanoes poking from the ice. And of course Indonesia and the Philippines were just too close to the impact, and too low. The waves took them. In East Africa we know what happened from a handful of refugees who reached us. The rift valley became active again. That plus the darkness and the ice advancing down Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya was enough. Maybe there are some Inuits or Sammi or such surviving somewhere on the ice, at least I hope so, but again, we’ve not heard from them. We were lucky. The West African oil and gas fields kept the greenhouses warm and lit, and everyone laboured to expand them to feed as many as possible as ships struggled in with more survivors.

A few hours after we sailed we saw the first drifting floes of ice, and gradually they coalesced into a sheet. The ice breakers moved up to take the lead, each with a line of ships following after it. Nuclear submarines disappeared beneath the waves to scout ahead, looking for the easiest path to follow, thin ice, or even better polynyas that might make the passage north quicker.

Beyond the sea ice I can see white ice all along the coast to the north. I can smell it too, the cold of it, the lifelessness, the sterility. It is our enemy, our nemesis, the icy end of the world that Norse mythology predicts. If it joins with the southern ice sheet, and already only a gap of one hundred and fifty kilometres separates them in places, then the whole of the Earth will become white, the land icebound, the oceans frozen. Snowball Earth they call it, and it is a stable state, so the scientists say, and will forever reflect the sun. Even if they are wrong, even if it only stays like that for a hundred years, that will be enough to finish off humanity.

So we are going to stop that. Our ships will steer first west until we get well out into the Atlantic, and then north, smashing our way up through the ice in three groups. Sea ice is thin, two, maybe three metres at the most. It will take time, but it is doable. Our group is turning north-east, to grind its way around Scotland and into the North Sea. Another will head for the Gulf of Mexico. And the last task force will power its way through the Mediterranean and try and reach the oilfields of the Middle East.

If and when we get there, we will try to open up the oilfields again, to restart production, and even drill new wells if necessary. The gas we will just vent, for methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than mere carbon dioxide, but the oil we will burn, as dirtily as possible so that black soot and unburned oil drifts down to coat the ice. The theory is that it will stop it reflecting away the heat and so the ice will melt. We have tried it before with soot dropped from aircraft, but found that soot is too soon covered by snow. The scientists said we needed a continuous flow of smoke, smoke that will blacken the snow even as it falls. There have been successes already, bombing opencast coal pits and setting them on fire, but most are buried too deep below the ice to make that easy.

I do not expect to see the day when England is green again, but maybe, just maybe, a child of mine might, in spite of what God wills. We know the great vault on Spitzbergen is intact, and in it lies the potential to reseed the world, to start again. And this time we will make the world in our image, not God’s.

the end