He very nearly didn’t hear his water taxi coming, its rotors beating almost silently in the rain. Water taxi was something of a misnomer. It was a taxi, certainly, one of many that ferried passengers up and down the river between the city and the temporary airbase at Helensburgh. But they never touched the water. They were smaller versions of the eVTOL that Brodie knew would take him up to Loch Leven. Like grown-up incarnations of the drones he had played with as a kid. Eight rotors in a circle around a glass bubble that carried four passengers. They flew above the river at something like two hundred feet, keeping to the left of an invisible centre line, obeying the rules of the road as if the river itself was some kind of highway. Which, Brodie supposed, it was. They had a good range, around three hours flying time, and could recharge wirelessly in fifteen minutes on any compatible helipad.
It touched down lightly on the pad in front of him, its coloured navigation lights cut through by rain. A door detached itself from the bubble and slid back as the rotors ceased to turn, and Brodie ran, crouched, through the downpour. A photoelectric cell mounted in the door frame read the card he flashed at it, and Brodie could see his face and ID appear on the driver’s screen inside. The driver leaned towards him. ‘Alright, pal. Jump in so I can shut the fucking door.’
Brodie swung his backpack through the open doorway and pulled himself up into one of four seats that faced each other behind the driver. As soon as the sensor in the seat detected his weight, a soporific American-accented female voice prompted, Buckle up, buckle up, repeatedly until he did. The door slid shut.
‘How could they no’ get a Scottish wumman to say that? Fucking American cow. That’s all I get all day long, mate. Drives me round the fucking bend. Try not to drip all over the good leather, eh?’ The driver engaged the rotors, and the eVTOL jerked gently as it lifted away from the ramp and banked across the levee to the river. ‘Another beautiful day,’ he said, without a hint of irony. He hovered for a moment until another water taxi had passed, before swooping up and out over the water.
Brodie could never quite get used to the lack of engine noise. The cab was cocooned in a silence broken only by the sound of rain on glass. The Clyde lay like some long grey slug beneath them, vanishing into the misted distance. Glasgow itself sprawled away into the rainfall, north and south, sporadic areas of flooding catching and reflecting what little light there was in the sky, like a random patchwork of paddy fields.
‘Cop, eh?’ the driver said, half glancing back over his shoulder.
Brodie grunted.
‘Should be out catching crooks instead of swanning off down the Clyde coast.’ He grinned into a rear-view screen. ‘Holiday, is it?’
‘Aye, right.’
‘Seriously, though, crime in Glasgow’s beyond a fucking joke these days, know what I mean, mate? Break-ins, carjackings. The lot. You’re not even safe in an e-chopper noo. Don’t know what the hell the government’s playing at. Mind you, who are you gonna vote for? The fucking Ecologists? Gimme a break.’
Brodie was aware of him looking in the rear-view screen again, but pretended that his interest had been drawn by something way below them and off to the north. Why did taxi drivers always assume you were a kindred spirit?
‘I blame the immigrants, me. All those... what are we supposed to call them now? Asians. Flooding in. Scuse the pun. Hardly ever see a Scottish face these days.’
Brodie couldn’t stop himself. ‘And what does a Scottish face look like?’
‘Like yours, mate.’
‘White, you mean?’
‘Aye, well, pink in your case. What’s wrong with that?’
‘There are plenty of Scots who’re not white.’
‘I’m talking about real Scots, pal.’
‘So am I. Folk born here. Second, third generation. As Scottish as you and me.’
The hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing climate catastrophe in Africa and Asia had been welcomed in through the Scottish Government’s open-doors policy. A policy prompted by concern over falling birth rates and extended life expectancy — an economically unsustainable demographic. But a policy that had fed a growing sense of protectionism, blatantly manifesting itself now as racism. The closed-doors policy pursued by the government in England, on the other hand, had only served to increase clandestine immigration, leading to soaring crime rates there, and even worse discrimination.
The driver said, ‘Baw-locks! Just cos they sound Scottish doesn’t mean they are.’
‘Aye, and just because the words coming out of your mouth bear a passing resemblance to the English language doesn’t mean they make any sense.’
The driver cast an aggrieved glance towards the rear-view screen. ‘Who fucking rattled your cage?’
Brodie shook his head and averted his gaze to the landscape drifting by below. Mercifully the driver took the hint and sat in brooding silence for the remainder of the journey.
Large wipers worked overtime to keep the glass free of rain. But it was a losing battle. The world was visible only through sheets of water that constantly distorted it.
Away to the south-west, Brodie saw the inundation surrounding the towns of Renfrew and Paisley. Water that lay in dull reflective sheets shimmered off into more rain. In the early days, the flooding had quickly subsumed the low-lying ground at Abbotsinch, north of Paisley, an area once criss-crossed by the runways of Glasgow Airport. An international hub where hundreds of flights had come and gone each week was now little more than a haven for water birds and fishermen.
They flew over the Erskine Bridge, and as they headed further west, Brodie could just pick out the taller buildings and church spires rising above the floodwaters which had claimed the lower-lying areas of Port Glasgow, and Greenock and Gourock. On the north bank of the estuary, the peninsula of Ardmore was now an island, not much more than a pinnacle of rock. And as they banked to the right, he saw that the snow-peaked mountains to the north were lost in cloud. It was impossible to tell where the land ended and the sky began. Immediately below them, the entire seafront at Helensburgh was gone.
The water taxi swooped over the town and up to the fingers of green that extended across the hilltop. What had previously been the golf course was now a temporary airbase for civilian, and some military, traffic. The extent of its links to the rest of the British Isles was limited by the range of the eVTOLs that served it. International flights were out of the question, except in hops via England, or the recently reunited Ireland, to Europe. Transatlantic flights in and out of Scotland had ceased a long time ago.
The old-fashioned cream clubhouse above the town comprised a jumble of steeply sloped slate roofs, chimneys and dormers, expanding to lounges and a pro shop under several flat-roofed extensions. It stood surrounded by winter-dead trees stripped of their leaves by a series of ice storms the previous month. Taken over by both military and civilian air traffic controllers, it was a hub of airborne activity, with drones and eVTOLs coming and going in a daily traffic halted only by extremes of weather.
The main helipad occupied the former eighteenth green and was surrounded by smaller satellite pads that handled the incoming and outgoing flights of aircraft like the water taxi that had brought Brodie downriver.
The driver settled his e-chopper with a slight bump on the pad furthest from the clubhouse. A much larger eVTOL stood on the main pad awaiting Brodie’s arrival. The driver squinted at it through the water streaming across his windscreen. ‘That yours, do you think?’ It was the first time he’d spoken in about twenty minutes.
‘Looks like it.’ Brodie struggled into his still-wet backpack.