“I will do what must be done to vanquish our common enemy. I will not bow to this Commander Dornen, but I will follow orders if that is what it takes to defeat the Izarians.”
Chapter Five
“N
ot very reassuring,” said Dornen. He had asked Helena to speak with him in his quarters, and they had just finished watching the recording of her conversation with Eric.
“I did what I could,” said Helena.
“From my perspective, it looked like mostly what you did is manipulate Eric into agreeing to fight for us, enticing him with ideas of fame and glory.”
“You would prefer I had sold him on the idea of Eric Bloodaxe, Savior of Humanity? Even if I succeeded, I think you’d regret encouraging him to think of himself as some kind of messiah. In any case, I doubt it would have worked. In my experience, the Norsemen are simple people. Their heroes are characterized by bravery, loyalty, honor, and competence in battle. Eric may have formally converted to Christianity, but he remains the son of a Norse chieftain at heart. He doesn’t want to save humanity, he wants to beat the shit out of monsters and look good doing it. What does it matter, as long as he’s willing to fight?”
“It matters,” said Dornen, “because I don’t want Eric getting some nutty idea like establishing a Viking fiefdom on some alien planet.”
“They can’t do much without a ship and people to fly it,” Helena said. “You’re their transportation.”
“If we put them in those suits, that gives them a hell of a lot of power. If they turn on us—”
“You’ve got bigger problems to worry about.”
“That’s always the trump card, isn’t it? Putting fifty bloodthirsty Vikings in mech suits is sheer insanity, but not doing it is worse. Unless, of course, we can still make contact with one of the fringe planets.”
“And waste how many more years, with no guarantee of success? I’m starting to think you’re trying to back out of the deal you made with Freya.”
“I’m not ‘backing out’ of anything. I’ve got 800 mech suits. Freya promised me men to fill them. She delivered fifty. Putting aside the matter of their disposition and competence, it’s not enough men to take the Izarian headquarters.”
“There are plenty more Vikings. Give Eric and his men a few weeks to prove themselves. Take them to someplace remote. Greenland, maybe. Put them in the suits and load them with non-lethal ammunition. Give them some training and see how they do. If they work out, we can recruit more men. If not, leave them here and continue your search.”
“I suppose we can spare a few weeks. Maybe your Vikings will surprise me. And what about you? Can we count on your help keeping Eric from going rogue or throwing a tantrum and tearing my ship apart?”
“I’m afraid not,” Helena said. “My husband’s health is not good, and there are matters that must be attended to at home.”
“On the island you call Bermuda.”
“Yes. We have a small community there, mostly made up of former Iron Dragon engineers. We get by raising our own food and trading with the native tribes, but it isn’t easy to survive using only bronze age technology.”
“You still live under the threat of your so-called LOKI principle? The idea that if you make waves, some personified force of history will wipe you out?”
“We rarely think about it in such terms, these days. Our motivations in keeping a low profile are simpler: technology creates wealth, wealth causes envy, and envy brings violence. Maybe we could smelt iron or create antibiotics without anybody noticing, but where do you draw the line? Eventually your neighbors notice that your tools are better than theirs, you live longer than they do, and your houses are more comfortable. So you’ve got to wall yourself off from the rest of the world, which only attracts more attention. I spent fifty years in an isolated community, trying to keep knowledge from getting out, and it’s not an enjoyable way to live. Better to accept the possibility of going hungry or getting sick than to live in constant fear of one’s neighbors.”
“Even so, we have excellent medical facilities aboard the ship. If your husband would consent to a full body scan, we could have the medbot customize a pharmaceutical regimen for him. We could give you a twenty-year supply. No one would need to know. You would almost certainly benefit as well.”
“No. Thank you, Commander, but there is nothing wrong with me or my husband but old age. We are both in our nineties, which is well over double the life expectancy of this time in Earth’s history. The only treatment we need is to go home, to our animals and our garden.”
“Very well. The offer remains open, if you change your mind. When did you wish to return to Bermuda?”
“As soon as is convenient for you, Commander.”
“Well, frankly, the less time Eric’s men are cooped up on my ship, the better. We need to find a place to set down where Eric’s men can try out the mech suits. Somewhere they won’t draw attention. Perhaps this ‘Greenland’ you mentioned. We can land in Bermuda and then continue on our way.”
“That sounds fine, Commander. Thank you. And good luck.”
*****
While O’Brien tended to his tomatoes and cucumbers, Freya walked with Helena around the perimeter of the community garden. The garden was ringed by a dozen small houses—many of them no more than huts—in which lived other alumni of the Iron Dragon project. A pleasant breeze carried the sounds of children playing in the nearby fields while women prepared food indoors or sat outside in the shade, sewing garments or repairing farming implements. Chickens ran freely about the garden, and a score of pigs lazed about in a nearby pen. Some of the men were busy harvesting grapefruit from a stand of citrus trees opposite the pig pen; Freya understood that several others were harvesting lumber in the woods to the north.
“You’re certain you won’t reconsider?” Freya asked, as a flock of swallows exploded from an orange tree only to regroup and settle on another.
“I’m sorry, child,” Helena said. Her small hand rested on Freya’s forearm as they walked. “I’m afraid O’Brien and I have had our share of excitement.” Helena always referred to her husband by his last name, as she had when they first met. “We’d just be in the way, in any event. Our place is here.”
“I suppose it won’t do any good to remind you that the fate of humanity is at stake.”
Helena chuckled. “The fate of humanity has been at stake for most of my life. O’Brien and I, along with your grandparents and the others, spent fifty years on a project that most would have considered impossible. We did our part.”
“So did I.”
“I know, child. You’ve suffered more than most, and it isn’t fair to expect more from you, but you are still young, and the war is not yet over.”
“The war O’Brien and my grandmother fought in won’t even start for another twelve hundred years.”
“Then you’ve got a head start!” Helena said with a weak smile. “I’m sorry, Freya. I wish there were someone else to take your burden, but there isn’t. There are only a few of us here on the island, and most of us are too old to be of any use in a war. Even the ones from your generation are twelve years older than you now, and they’ve all got families who depend on them. We barely scrape by as it is; we can’t afford to lose any able-bodied men or women.”
“Even if it means humanity itself is doomed?”
Helena sighed. “Look around you, Freya. These people are farmers. Fifteen years ago they were engineers, welders, or carpenters. Most have never picked up a sword, to say nothing of a machinegun. We’re a peaceful settlement. Anyone with an interest in fighting left years ago.”
Freya watched as the swallows burst into the sky again and retreated into the distance, ultimately disappearing into the pines to the north. “I know, Helena. I just wish…”
“You weren’t all alone. I understand. I got a taste of that sort of loneliness when I left Constantinople to join a bunch of Vikings led by spacemen from the future who were trying to build a spaceship. But I don’t pretend to
know what it’s like to spend four years alone in a ship not much bigger than our house. And then, after all that, to be responsible for brokering a deal between Eric’s men and the Truscans, to try to bring an end to a war that hasn’t even started yet…. It’s too much for any one person to bear.”
“I will see it through,” said Freya. “I have to.”
“Do you?” asked Helena. “It seems to me that you and I have done what we could. Ultimately, whether Dornen and Eric can manage to work together—and whether the Truscans will help us against the Cho-ta’an—is out of our hands. You’ve done your part as well, Freya. Why not stay here with us? It’s not an easy life, but at least you wouldn’t be alone.”
Freya closed her eyes and turned away, willing away tears. Ever since she had returned to Earth, the thought of settling down and living a normal life with her own people had lurked at the back of her mind. She had been telling herself that it wasn’t an option because if she failed to deliver an army to the Truscans, then the entire Iron Dragon project was for nothing. But there was another, deeper, reason: the fact was, these weren’t her people anymore, if they ever were. She’d spent four years alone in deep space, not knowing how long her voyage would last or whether it was all for nothing. Even Helena, who was trying so hard to understand, would never know what that was like. Helena and O’Brien were like family to her, but seeing the connection they had with each other pained her. And within a few years, O’Brien would die, and then Helena, and then she would truly be alone. She thought she would rather be back on the Cho-ta’an ship than to live among these people without Helena or O’Brien.
“No,” she said. “Thank you, but I can’t. When I stepped out of the lander and saw that you and O’Brien were still alive… well, I suppose this isn’t saying much, but that was the happiest moment of my life. Happier even than the moment Commander Dornen brought me aboard Varinga. Up until the moment I saw you, it all seemed like a dream. When I saw you two, I knew it was real. And this may sound strange, but… I want to hold onto that moment. I think I can survive anything if I can just hold onto that.”
Helena embraced her, and Freya felt tears running down her face despite her best efforts. “I understand,” said Helena.
But she didn’t.
Chapter Six
E ric Bloodaxe, clad in a mech suit’s armor, bounded down a steep, snow-covered slope on powerful mechanical legs, a score of iron giants following close behind. A week earlier, they had struggled to control the machines, often falling on their faces while growling a stream of curses, but now the suits were like a second skin. They moved through the deep drifts faster than any man could run, churning up a wake of powder that settled on their fallen comrades, lying still in the snow, entombed in their own armor.
Eric had lost over half his men already, but they had brought down at least as many of their adversaries, and now they had the enemy on the run. The robot tanks, rolling down the hillside on their metal treads, were faster and better suited to the terrain, but Eric had concluded their mechanical brains lacked imagination. Determined to keep the Vikings from taking a strategically important ridge, the enemy had harassed Eric’s men with a small contingent of flying machines while leaving the tanks to guard the ridge. The fliers were quick but relatively fragile; a single well-aimed burst from a mech suit’s machineguns would take one down.
Forcing himself to remain patient, Eric had instructed his men to stand their ground and direct their fire at the fliers until they’d been eliminated, rather than attempting to take the ridge in a rapid forward charge. It had been a risky and costly decision, resulting in the deaths of several of his men, but it had been the right move. Once the last flier had fallen, Eric split his force into three squads to assault the ridge from three different directions. Their coordination had been near-perfect: the tanks, although they outnumbered the Norsemen, were forced to fight on three fronts at once. By the time Eric’s men converged at the top of the ridge, the eight remaining tanks were fleeing at top speed down the northeastern slope, their cannons firing haphazardly up the slope behind them.
Eric had left one squad on the ridge while he and the rest of his men pursued the tanks. They had already won the battle, but it wasn’t the Viking way to let enemies run away. Not killing them now meant having to deal with them again later. Fear had always been a great ally of the Vikings; men who killed without reason or mercy projected power far beyond the battlefield.
Gulbrand, to Eric’s left, fell with a howl as one of the tank’s scored a lucky shot. Gulbrand tumbled down the slope, the suit’s robotic limbs kicking up a blinding storm of powder. “Switch to infrared!” he shouted, but he was too late to save the man behind Gulbrand, who misjudged the slope ahead of him and fell as well, skidding on his belly some fifty yards before slamming into a boulder. Eric and the others pressed on. The tanks were moving fast, putting distance between them and the Norsemen, but Eric, having studied the terrain, knew that the tanks were heading toward a crevasse they couldn’t possibly leap over. Even if they had some capability he was unaware of that would allow them to cross the chasm, he was certain they would have to slow significantly to do it. Eric’s men would advance within close range and finish them off.
Before the tanks reached the crevasse, two more men had fallen, including Eric’s brother, Ragnald. Still Eric pressed on, half-running, half-falling down the hillside. With each step, he slid close to twenty feet in the snow, but the suit’s gyros kicked in, keeping him upright. He let out an exultant roar, which was echoed by the men bounding through the snow on the left and right of him. Eric had had his doubts about the mech suits, thinking they would interfere with the primal immediacy of battle, but he found that he’d been wrong: with the suit, he was stronger, faster, more deadly. He rained death from his fingertips. It was good to fight with an axe or a spear, but it was better to fight with a two-ton suit of armor equipped with two .50 caliber machineguns that could unload twenty rounds a second.
The first of the tanks had begun to slow, swerving to the right to follow the edge of the crevasse to the southeast. Another, to its left, tried the same maneuver but turned too quickly, sliding sideways along the surface until it vanished into the crevasse. The other tanks made the corner, but only by slowing greatly. Eric’s men skidded through the turn and followed, closing the gap. Eric grinned. The terrain roughened ahead, which would give the bipedal mech suits an advantage over the tanks.
Sure enough, the tanks began to slow again. Merging into single file, they swerved wildly to avoid a series of boulders. But there was no avoiding the mile-long patch of rocky ground that lay beyond. The tanks slowed to a crawl as they spread out again and made their way over and around the rocks.
“Halt!” Eric shouted, as he neared the boulders—unnecessarily, as his voice would be transmitted automatically to the helmet radios of the other Norsemen. “Take cover and blast them to Hel!”
The Norsemen skidded to a halt behind the boulders and one by one leveled their guns at the fleeing tanks. The tanks, still trundling onward, fired their cannons toward the Vikings, blasting rocks to pieces and kicking up bursts of powder. Eric’s men responded with a barrage of machinegun fire. One of Eric’s men, still in the open, was felled by a cannon blast as he tried to get to cover. Another man, who had lost his footing and slid headfirst into a boulder, lay unmoving to Eric’s right.
The tank nearest to them exploded as its fuel tank ruptured. Another had struck a boulder at a bad angle and flipped over; it lay on its back, treads spinning impotently. The tanks’ vitals were well-protected, but they couldn’t stand up to a sustained barrage of armor-piercing rounds. Three more tanks were quickly incapacitated, and the remaining two crawled away, making little headway through the boulders littering their path. Eric heard someone shouting in his ear, but he couldn’t make out the message over the noise of gunfire and explosions. Whatever it was would have to wait. His men were on the verge of obliterating the enemy.
He straightened, the me
ch suit rising to its full height of nearly ten feet, and vaulted over the boulder in front of him. “Now to finish them!” he roared, and his men followed him. The ground erupted in a blast of rock and snow as a shell struck nearby, but Eric was not cowed. He bounded forward, leaping over rocks and weaving to the left of right as the last two tanks tried to get a bead on him. He slid behind another boulder, and men took cover to his left and right. His heads-up display, showing an overhead view of the area, told him that they had the tanks nearly surrounded. They let loose another barrage, and the tanks ground to a halt. One continued firing for a while before finally exploding, showering Eric’s men with chunks of metal and flaming debris. Eric’s heads-up display told him the last remaining tank was effectively dead, its mechanical brain showing no sign of activity. Eric’s men, exulting in their victory, continued to pound the thing with their guns until it was an unrecognizable pile of wreckage. When they finally stopped, their guns empty, Bjorn stomped forward, took hold of the machine’s chassis, and hurled it into the crevasse. The men erupted into a chorus of victory cries.
As the noise faded, Eric again became aware of shouting in his ear. “…forced to retreat!” he heard the voice say. He recognized it now as Halfdan, the leader of the team he’d left to hold the ridge. A few of the men began to sing, and Eric growled at them to be quiet. “…coming your way!” Halfdan was saying.
“Say again, Halfdan,” Eric said. “What’s coming our way?”
“Fliers!” Halfdan said. “They must have held back a group of them. We couldn’t hold the ridge. They’ve been circling overhead but they just flew east. Looks like they’re headed right for—”
Halfdan’s voice was drowned out by the sound of machinegun fire. Bjorn fell, and then Baldur. Three more men had fallen before Eric spotted the six fliers, now soaring silently overhead, at a height of maybe three hundred yards. They flew eastward and then split into two groups of three, one banking left and the other right. Some of the men took aim, but Eric shouted at them to take cover. In a few seconds, the fliers would come back around, and Eric’s men were standing in the open. The Norsemen scrambled for cover, some of them colliding in their haste. Eric heard machinegun fire again, and a row of bullets struck the ground to his left, throwing up blinding tufts of snow.
The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5) Page 6