Flight of the Tide Pilots

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished.

I was awoken by a rumble like a broadhead stampede passing through our farmhouse. I rolled off my bed and under its frame. My little brother, Edgard, was already under his – barely two years old, his eyes as wide as owls.

Since the Imperium had reopened the ocean mineral mines, ground shakes had become a regular occurrence. But this one was different. This was no mere shake. This was a thunder which shook the world. Each wave was deafening, lifting and dropping the house five, six, seven times...

As the shocks diminished, father burst in.

"Raia, it's time. The order came through on the aircable."

I swallowed. "Evacuation?"

My father nodded. "Help your brother."

I leapt to my feet, grabbing our go bags, shoes and clothes.

My father made sure we were well-drilled for this. As the climate worsened, we heard news about towns across the Lowlands being washed away by stormflows, both from the sea and from the highlands. The forecasters told us Brightport's day would come, but they could not tell us what day.

Today was that day, I realized, with a stony heart.

In the depth of night, we left our little farm forever. Edgard wept as our father took an axe to the fences, giving the lambs and swine some poor chance at freedom.

Then, laden under packs and stumbling through aftershocks, father led us along the cliff road down into Brightport and the riverfront where our salvation was moored.

The Imperium told the Lowlanders that they could not save our lands. But they would guarantee safe passage, and evacuate us on the Queen Fortuna – a vast residential ship.

The vessel had dwarfed Brightport's humble fishing harbour for weeks. We had watched the stevedores loading the town's food stores into its hold and refuelling it from our shore reserves, all under the close watch of Imperium soldiers. This was supposed to be preparation for us Lowlanders spending months at sea. Our first step into an uncertain future.

But on this day, as we rounded the headland, I first heard the crowds: thousands, shouting, wailing, despairing. Then the vista opened up below us and I saw floods of people, flowing from hillside to flatlands, sidewalk to road, dockside to jetty, converging on Brightport's small fishing harbour, at the edge of the mighty Coronado River.

Despite our haste, we were among the last to arrive. There were so many people it took me a moment to realise the absence at the centre of the throng: the ship was gone.

The Queen Fortuna was our only way out of Brightport.

But it had vanished.

We were still in the slopes of the cliffs, when my father pulled us up short. I saw terror on his face. He pointed over the crowds, past the harbour wall, to the black expanse of the Coronado River beyond.

Although it was dark, I could see the lights of small boats dotted across it. But the boats were moving backwards, upstream... and sideways.

As if they were not being navigated but forced in that direction.

As if the incalculable volume of water of the Coronado River had been reversed by some underwater leviathan.

"They did it..." gasped my father.

"What's happening?" my mother asked.

"There were rumours on Resistance channels. But we didn't believe they would dare..."

"What is it?"

"This is no natural disaster. They've collapsed the ocean mines, to send a tsunami upstream..."

At that moment, the shouts from the riverside turned to screams. The river level had surged. We saw white crests overtopping the harbour walls. Dozens of fishing boats moored there, rolled over and became tangled in each other's rigging, creating a single chaotic raft which lurched across the enclosed harbour towards the people on the dockside.

"We have to get uphill," mother urged.

I hoisted Edgard into my arm and we turned tail. But as we traversed the peak of the headland, I glanced back and glimpsed the wave of water and hulls and debris overwhelm the thousands of people spread along the jetties, extinguishing their lanterns and their voices in an instant.

That was the moment my young mind was opened to the Imperium's cruelty – and the depth of Imperator Dux's lies.

This was his scheme: to quench the endless fires which scoured the Inlands, where the Imperium ruled from, by drowning the Lowlands. To send water in such quantities back up the rivers that it would extinguish the burning fields, staunch the fire twisters, and flood the hellfire tunnels of the Inlands.

The terrible cost paid in the lives of the Lowlanders was nothing to the Inlanders.

That was ten years ago.

We did not imagine that those early crises would become the heartbeat of my people's existence. Every wildfire season, they flood us, reversing the Coronado River, laying waste to our homeland, just to extinguish their own burning lands.

And this is not the only way they erase us. Every month, every week, the Imperium find new ways to take away our safety, our homes, our lands – just to protect their own.

But now it is our turn.

My glidecraft rides the thermals of the waste pool boiling beneath me.

It is brimming with the poisonous byproduct of Imperium power stations. But I see only a reservoir of Imperator Dux's negligence. It was his decision to stop processing this deadly waste, and simply ship it downriver to dump it in the Lowlands. Out of sight, out of mind.

That was his first mistake.

I give a signal to Edgard in his glidecraft next to me; only 12 years old and already the Resistance's best pilot. Our parents' glidecraft flank our wings, as our formation swoops over the western lip of the huge concrete tank.

Immediately auto-cannon fire strafes our squadron. We dive in four directions, seeking cover amidst the radioactive steam.

Our target is the opposite wall – the eastern wall, the one which was condemned in years of reports leaked to the Resistance. The Imperium's own inspectors had found it unmaintained, unreinforced, and vulnerable to terrorist attack. Imperator Dux's response was to defund waste reprocessing altogether.

Our craft scream into evasive bombing trajectories. Pulse chains from the Imperial defences only succeed in heating our wake.

At the critical moment, we release our amphibious drones. The machines dive into the sludge. They can survive the nightmare conditions for just the few precious seconds required to reach the wall's lowest point. Then they will detonate their payloads.

I pull fiercely on my glidecraft's controls, feeling it strain to climb. I cannot avoid the cannon fire, I can only hope to escape the cauldron.

At the last second, I clear the top of the crumbling eastern wall.

Then I see the explosion. A seething balloon of toxic green expands out of the surface of the pool, then crashes down. The blast wave hits me, tossing my glidecraft in the air.

As I regain control, I watch this crucible of hell collapse. The eastern wall crumbles, unleashing a tide of nuclear waste into the surging Coronado River, which will carry the lethal cocktail upstream, poisoning the Inlanders with their own nuclear effluent.

I count the three spans of my family's glidecraft close behind me. We swoop down the foothills towards the sanctuary of the Lowlands coastal wastes.

Today we turned the tide of the war.

Today we turned their sins against them.

Tomorrow we attack the heart of the Imperium: Imperator Dux's floating stronghold, the Queen Fortuna.

Written for the Fantasy Prologue II Challenge