‘Where are you going in that, then?’
‘Out to Mull, then Loch Leven.’
The driver turned as the door slid open, and there was something malevolent in his half-smile. ‘Rather you than me, mate.’ He tapped his screen. ‘According to the weather reports, we’ve got a nasty ice storm incoming this afternoon. Get caught in that, and yon big bird’ll drop oot the sky before you can say “ice on the rotors”.’
Brodie pulled on his baseball cap. ‘Thank you.’
But his sarcasm only amused the driver further. ‘Yer welcome, pal.’
Brodie’s face was wet and stinging from the cold before he’d taken barely a dozen steps. Icy water seeped in around his neck and his cuffs as he dashed across the neatly manicured grass towards his waiting eVTOL. It stood dripping in the pewtery late morning light. Built more like a conventional aircraft with an extended fuselage, its rotors were mounted at the end of either wing, on forward extensions, and on a V-shaped tail at the rear. Six in total. The aircraft sat on three legs splaying out front and back, and the cabin, like his water taxi, was made almost entirely of smoked glass.
As he reached it, Brodie saw a figure clad in luminous yellow oilskins hurrying towards him from the clubhouse. Old-fashioned cotton cloth waterproofed with oil, he assumed, since plastics had been banned for years now. Brodie stood, dripping impatiently, on the pad. When the technician reached him, he pulled a contactless card reader from under his cape and held it out towards Brodie. ‘ID,’ he barked through the wet.
Brodie flashed his card at the reader and the technician satisfied himself that this was indeed the police officer whose arrival was expected.
‘Cool,’ he said, and waved an RFID card at the nearside door of the aircraft to open it, then held it out to Brodie. ‘Use this to secure the aircraft at destination.’
Brodie frowned. ‘Won’t the pilot do that?’
The technician laughed. ‘There is no pilot, pal. Well, there is.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘He’s in the clubhouse. This thing’ll fly itself. It’s been preprogrammed. Pilot’s got a watching brief in case anything goes wrong. We’ve not lost one yet.’
‘I’m not surprised if he’s always sitting in the clubhouse.’
Oilskins pulled a face. ‘Very funny.’ He reached past Brodie and pulled open a flap on the side of the fuselage. ‘Retractable charging cable’s in there. Two hundred metres of it, which should be more than enough. Get it charging as soon as you arrive. No wireless charging available on the football pitch, I’m afraid.’
‘Football pitch?’
‘Aye. That’s what we’ve been using as a temporary landing area at Kinlochleven. There’s a charging terminal installed at the changing pavilion. And your hotel’s right next door. The International.’ He nodded towards the interior. ‘You’d better get in out of the rain. Sit up front so you’ve got access to the computer screen.’
Brodie heaved his pack into the rear of the cabin and pulled himself in, sliding across into one of the two front seats. Oilskins climbed in beside him.
‘We took out the passenger seats in the back in case you’re returning with a body. And the pathologist’s usually got a fair amount of gear.’ He leaned forward and tapped the middle of the screen twice with his index and middle fingers. It immediately presented a welcome screen. A photograph of the eVTOL taken against a clear blue sky on a bright, sunny day. Brodie thought that it couldn’t have been taken here, or at any time recently. A soothing, English-accented female voice introduced herself. Welcome to your Grogan Industries Mark Five eVTOL air taxi.
Oilskins said, ‘Zebra-Alpha-Kilo-496. Eve, activate remote.’
The screen flickered and displayed an aerial topographical map with their projected route marked in red.
Remote activated, Zak.
Oilskins turned a wry smile towards Brodie and shook his head. ‘Even the damn machines call me that now. You been in one of these things before?’
‘Never.’
‘You’ll get the computer’s attention just by saying Eve. She’ll put you in direct communication with the pilot if you have any problems or questions. You can watch a movie if you want, or catch the news.’
Brodie couldn’t imagine that he would be doing anything except sitting on tenterhooks until Eve had put him safely on the ground again.
‘So, if you’ve got no questions, I’ll let you get on your way.’ Zak slipped off his seat to jump down to the pad.
Brodie said, ‘I’m told there’s an ice storm coming in.’ He cast eyes around him. ‘I hear these things don’t do too well in ice storms.’
Zak grinned. ‘No worries, mate. You should reach destination long before she arrives.’
‘She?’
‘Aye, she’s a named storm. Hilda, they’re calling her. A German name. Means battle, or war, or something.’ He grinned. ‘Let’s hope you and Eve don’t get into a fight with her.’ He laughed now. ‘Only joking. Eve’ll take care of you. They’ve programmed a bit of a detour, via Glencoe, just in case it gets a bit blowy before Hilda actually gets here. It’s more sheltered that way and you’ll be able to maintain max speed of about 200k. You’ll be fine.’ He pressed a button on the inside of the door frame and jumped down as the door slid shut.
Brodie felt himself encased again in silence, save for Eve urging him to buckle up. The sound of the rain retreated to a distant patter, although it still streamed down the windscreen. Zak vanished at a run towards the clubhouse and Brodie felt more than heard the rotors starting up. Through the sweep of smoked glass overhead, he could see them rapidly reach speed before Eve lifted gently off the pad, rising slowly into the rain. The rotors canted unexpectedly, angling themselves into a semi-vertical position to provide forward thrust, and the eVTOL shot off suddenly across the roofs of the clubhouse and the trees, lifting higher as it did. Still there was no sound, and Brodie, sitting alone in this strangely alien environment, felt oddly disconnected from the world, as if he had just surrendered his present and his future to some invisible guiding hand over which he had no control.
Eve flew low and fast above the sodden winter ground below. Over the Gare Loch and its long-abandoned nuclear submarine base at Faslane. Loch Long with its lost village of Arrochar, drowned by the storms and the accompanying rise in sea level, cutting off direct access to the West Highlands by road.
Most of the settlements along both shores of Loch Fyne were gone. Strachur, Auchnabreac, and much of Inveraray.
There was snow lying on higher ground now, and the mountain ranges to the north — when you could see them through the cloud — were mostly blanketed by it.
Of course, Brodie knew, Scotland had escaped relatively lightly. Large parts of eastern England had simply vanished under the North Sea. From Hull, as far inland as Goole and Selby. And to the south, Grimsby, Skegness, Boston, King’s Lynn. Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft had barely survived. On the west coast, the bright lights of Blackpool had been washed away. Lytham St Annes and Southport were gone.
Much of London was underwater, too. The authorities had moved too slowly in replacing the old Thames barrier, and had run into funding problems when building the levees that would have protected the estuary.
On the near continent, most of the Netherlands, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, had been reclaimed by the sea. A good chunk of Belgium, the German seaports of Hamburg and Bremen, as well as large swathes of the western seaboard of Denmark had also succumbed to rising sea levels.
There was worse, much worse, elsewhere in the world. But there was a limit to how much you could absorb before you became waterlogged yourself by too much information. It was one of the reasons Brodie had simply stopped listening to the news, or reading the newspapers, or watching TV. It was depressing beyond words. Suicide rates, he knew, were soaring. Because above all, there was nothing you could do about it. Any of it. So, like many others, he had simply zoned out, limiting consciousness to his own little bubble of existence. The only place he had any say in how things played out.