The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic

by Robert Kroese

  “What have we got, Mr. Lee?” Huiskamp asked, stepping into the pit.

  Commander Hiram Lee, chief tactical officer of GODCOM, sat looking up at a window showing an algorithm-generated representation of the Geneva system. Lee’s round face and boyish features, framed by unruly thick black hair, belied both the man’s age and his expertise. Lee had been in the IDL for nearly twenty years and was one of the best tactical thinkers Huiskamp had met. To Lee’s right was the chief of navigation, Marissa Aguilar, a pert, sharp-featured woman with dark brown hair pulled into a single braid that lay between her shoulder blades. To Aguilar’s left was the chief engineer, Dietrich Haas, a small man with a brush cut and a pleasant, if somewhat aloof, demeanor. All three turned to acknowledge Huiskamp with a salute, which he returned. “As you were, folks,” Huiskamp said. He walked up to stand next to Lee, his lean figure towering over the stocky officer. Lee tapped the button on the side of his comm helmet to retract his mic shield.

  “Twenty-four bogeys,” Lee said. “Came through the gate just over six minutes ago.”

  “Definitely not ours,” Huiskamp said. He’d intended it as a question, but it came out as a flat statement.

  “No, sir,” Lee replied. “I tried to hail them, per procedure, but received no response. Gate cams and radar are down, but we’ve got video from sentry drones in the area. All ships are of Cho-ta’an construction. Looks like four destroyers and twenty interceptors.” These were the most common types of Cho-ta’an warships: interceptors were small, fast, lightly armed vessels designed for a crew of three or four Cho-ta’an. Destroyers were larger, all-purpose craft designed for a crew of twenty or more. Some were heavily armed with powerful railguns and nuclear-tipped missiles, while others were glorified cargo ships.

  “So the warning from Andrea Luhman was accurate.”

  “It appears so, Admiral. The Cho-ta’an have hacked our gates.” Andrea Luhman, named for an early pioneer in starship drives, was an IDL exploratory ship that had transmitted a warning six days earlier that the Cho-ta’an had figured out how to use hyperspace gates nominally controlled by the IDL. Pursued by enemy ships, Andrea Luhman attempted to outrun the Cho-ta’an by accelerating to nearly a third of light speed and then entering the Fomalhaut gate, intending to jump to the Sol system. But Andrea Luhman never emerged from the Sol gate—or anywhere else, as far as anybody in the IDL could tell. The ship and crew were presumed lost, blown to atoms or stranded in some distant corner of the universe, thanks to a glitch with the jumpgates.

  “Then this is it,” Huiskamp said. “Our last stand.”

  Chapter Two

  Huiskamp stood watching the twenty-four bogeys slowly gaining on the three seedships on their way to Geneva. “Any word from Mobi-COM?”

  “No, sir,” said Commander Lee. “Going on sixteen hours for Mobi-COM and twelve for the Kilimanjaro. And we’re not likely to hear anything for a while. Comms is reporting they’ve lost contact with the Geneva Gate.”

  “The Cho-ta’an are jamming the signal?”

  “Looks that way, sir. Some kind of distortion field. It’s affecting the cams and radar too. I can’t even get telemetry data from the gate.”

  “Where does the field originate?”

  “Hard to tell, sir. Best guess is a powerful transmitter on an unmanned rocket launched from one of the ships shortly after they came through.”

  Huiskamp nodded. It made sense that the Cho-ta’an had come up with a way of jamming radio communications with the gates. When communications had gone dead with the Interstellar Defense League’s Mobile Command Headquarters the previous day, he had feared the worst. Eighteen months earlier, as the Cho-ta’an continued to encroach deeper into human space and the Geneva system was deemed under threat, the Supreme Headquarters of the IDL had been moved from GODCOM to Mobi-COM. Huiskamp, who had previously helmed the battleship Yosemite, was promoted to admiral and put in charge of the defense of the Epsilon Eridani system—colloquially known as the Geneva system, after its most important planet. He had accepted the new post only under considerable pressure, considering it to be—quite literally—a dead end assignment. It was only a matter of time before the Cho-ta’an reached Geneva, and when they did, Huiskamp would have much preferred to be commanding a battleship rather than sitting comfortably inside a giant, slowly revolving target in orbit around the planet. Now he silently mused that he’d been promoted again: if Mobi-COM had been taken out, he was in command of the entire IDL—whatever was left of it. As of the previous day, the IDL had only one deep space cruiser group left. This group, led by Admiral Peter Chiang of the Kilimanjaro, was last known to be in the Procyon system, but the Procyon gate hadn’t been responding to pings for nearly twelve hours.

  Mobi-COM’s location was supposed to be classified, but like all the IDL’s ships, it was dependent on the hyperspace gates for interstellar travel. If the Cho-ta’an had figured out how to bypass the security on the gates, it would have been a trivial matter for them to send probes to spy on traffic through them undetected. The Cho-ta’an could have pinpointed Mobi-COM’s location and sent ships through to execute a surprise attack. Mobi-COM would have sent a distress signal, but the signal would have had to be relayed by a gate, and now it seemed the Cho-ta’an had the ability to jam communications with the gates.

  “What about the Chrylis gate?” Huiskamp asked. This corner of the galaxy was unique in that it was the only place where there were two hyperspace gates within a light year of each other. The Chrylis gate was little used since the Chinese mining colonies rebelled and were shut down, but in a pinch the second gate could be used for transportation to the Geneva system. The two gates were about three hundred billion kilometers apart—about ninety days travel at a constant one gee acceleration.

  “Last telemetry signal from Chrylis relayed by the Geneva gate was two hours ago. All nominal at that time, sir. But with Geneva out, we’re reliant on direct transmission.”

  “Understood, Mr. Lee.” If the Cho-ta’an were jamming communications to and from the Geneva gate, any information coming from outside the system would have to go through the Chrylis gate. If there were a problem with the Chrylis gate, they wouldn’t know for over eleven days—the time it would take for a signal to reach them from the gate.

  “Velocity and trajectory of the incoming ships?”

  “4700 kps and decelerating at one point five gees, Admiral. Maintaining a tight formation. Current vectors indicate an elliptical course around the sun.”

  “Will they get close enough to target Geneva?”

  “Not on the first pass, sir. They’re coming in too fast and the trajectory is wrong. They’ll have to arc around the sun before attempting to rendezvous with Geneva. Estimate sixty-eight hours to perihelion, and another forty until orbital engagement with Geneva.”

  “What’s the status of the seedships?”

  “Three hundred sixty million klicks from Geneva elliptical. Velocity five hundred kps, decelerating at one gee. Sixty-two hours from Geneva orbit.”

  Huiskamp chewed his lower lip. The situation didn’t look good. The three seedships, hastily constructed in the Gliese system, were humanity’s last chance at survival. The Cho-ta’an had now destroyed or blockaded nearly every star system inhabited by humans and annihilated every refugee ship bound for other known worlds. The only star systems still under human control were Geneva and Procyon—and Procyon was incommunicado. Humanity’s only remaining option was to send colonization ships to unknown parts of the galaxy in the hopes of finding habitable planets unknown to the Cho-ta’an. Considerable IDL resources had been redirected to the seedship facility, which had only been able to build three ships before it too fell to the Cho-ta’an onslaught.

  The three seedships, called Renaissance, Freedom and Philadelphia, were each manned by a skeleton crew of eight IDL officers and a dozen enlisted men. The ships had left drydock a week earlier, accelerated for five days, and then went through the jumpgate on the outskirts of the Gliese system, one after
the other, at intervals of about three hours. Thanks to the miracle of hyperspace travel, the ships emerged instantaneously in the Geneva system, traveling at the same velocity relative to the Geneva gate. Once in-system, the three ships flipped end-for-end and began to decelerate in order to put them on a trajectory that would allow them to achieve orbit around Geneva.

  The largest space-faring vessels ever constructed by humans—larger even than GODCOM and Mobi-COM—the three identical seedships were designed to comfortably house four hundred people each, three hundred of whom would be in suspension at any given moment. The ships would house a self-sustaining ecosystem capable of producing enough food for everyone on board, as well as five years’ worth of backup supplies. Additionally, each ship would carry a “Terran Gamete Payload.” Each TGP contained five thousand frozen human embryos, and sperm and egg samples from tens of thousands of human donors, as well as a complete gamete library of every extant plant and animal species. Theoretically, each ship would hold enough genetic diversity to ensure the survival of the human race. The seedships were designed to travel for a thousand years if necessary to reach a viable destination. It was assumed that many, if not all, of the “colonists” who began the journey would die en route; in fact, the people who reached the destination might well be four or more generations removed from the original passengers.

  Planets habitable to humans were rare, but not nearly as rare as had once been believed. The kidney-shaped region commonly known as “IDL space” had been thoroughly explored, but there were several thousand stars within a hundred light-years of Earth, and close to half of these had at least one planet within the habitable range from its star. Carbon-based life had been found on one in ten of the planets in this range, although most of it was rudimentary, and most of these planets were not suitable for human life, at least without a terraforming program that would take many decades. The IDL’s best minds estimated an eighty percent chance that at least one of the three seedships would find a habitable planet within five hundred years.

  The seedship program, undertaken in the midst of a war for the survival of the human race, was perhaps the single most expensive and complex engineering and logistical challenge humanity had ever faced. The process of choosing the colonists (done primarily by lottery, with twenty percent of the slots filled by hand-picked scientists, engineers, artists and other people considered especially valuable for the project) had nearly provoked a civil war. Even now, twelve hundred people waited at a specially constructed IDL housing facility in Geneva City to be shuttled to the seedships. The process of shuttling them, along with the genomic payload and other cargo, into orbit was expected to take three weeks once the seedships reached Geneva. That schedule was the result of two years of planning to make the onboarding process as quick and efficient as possible.

  After the seedships were in orbit, the process of loading cargo and passengers would begin. Over the next three weeks, shuttle craft would ferry colonists, supplies, and the TGP. The seedships would go through the Geneva jumpgate, each with a different destination gate. From the destination gates, they would head away from known space in three different directions, each targeting a promising cluster of stars. If even one of the three ships could get to a habitable planet out of the reach of the Cho-ta’an, humanity would have a chance.

  “Given current vectors and acceleration,” Huiskamp said, “how close will the incoming vessels get to the seedships?”

  Lee had clearly anticipated the question, as he had an answer at the ready. “In fifty-two hours, they’ll pass just within two million klicks of the seedships,” he said.

  “Out of railgun range,” Huiskamp replied, unable to hide the relief in his voice. In addition to the fate of humanity, Huiskamp had a personal interest in the survival of the seedships: his son, Jason, was the captain of Freedom. Jason had been selected along with two others, Sharon Sloan and Christophe Landa, from over a hundred qualified officers in the IDL.

  Lee nodded. “And if they maintain current acceleration, the intercept window will be a few nanoseconds. They might get a missile lock, but the seedships could preemptively deploy chaff. Unlikely the Choties would score a hit.” Huiskamp raised an eyebrow at Lee’s use of the pejorative slang term for the alien race. The IDL brass officially frowned upon the use of the term, but Huiskamp had never been a stickler for diplomatic niceties when it came to genocidal aliens. Under ordinary circumstances, he might have issued a perfunctory correction in the interest of preventing the epithet from propagating to the enlisted men, but Lee and the other officers were well aware that these were not ordinary circumstances. Mobi-COM had been out of contact for eighteen hours, and like as not had been blown to atoms. Huiskamp let the remark pass.

  “Interesting,” he said. Given the timing of the Cho-ta’an ships’ arrival shortly after the destruction of the ship-building facility in the Gliese system, he had to assume the Cho-ta’an understood the significance of the seedships. But the Cho-ta’an ships were coming in far too fast for an effective attack on either the seedships or Geneva. “Are these the same ships that took out Gliese?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir. From the reports we received before Gliese went dark, that was a larger force, with several destroyers and at least one dreadnaught. Our best guess is that these came from Alpha Centauri.”

  Huiskamp rubbed his chin, considering. The mining outposts in the Alpha Centauri system had fallen a few weeks earlier when a group of Cho-ta’an ships emerged from deep space to execute a surprise attack. Since the attack occurred before the Cho-ta’an figured out how to hack the gates and there were no enemy gates within twenty light-years of Alpha Centauri, the Cho-ta’an must have been planning the attack for at least two decades. It was hard to imagine the sort of single-minded focus required for such an attack. The Cho-ta’an had no stasis pods on their ships, which meant that even with the temporal dilation of near-light-speed travel, the crews of those ships had passed several years en route to their target. The chief factor differentiating interstellar war from intraplanet or intrasystem conflicts was its staggeringly slow pace.

  Now, of course, all that had changed. If the Cho-ta’an could use the human-constructed jumpgates, the topology of the war theater had changed so dramatically that all the strategic planning the IDL had done over the past fifty years was about as useful as a paper roadmap to an airplane pilot. Two points that were once separated by twenty years of travel were now effectively on top of each other. A Cho-ta’an ship could be in the Alpha Centauri system one second and in the Geneva system the next.

  The sheer scope of the war—in terms of both physical space and time elapsed—was so vast that the IDL had only the vaguest ideas of the size and composition of the Cho-ta’an force, or where any of their ships were at any given time. The best guess of the IDL brass was that the Cho-ta’an had around three hundred interceptors, eighty destroyers, ten dreadnaughts, and perhaps two dozen other large warships of various types. The Gliese facility had been the last remaining major target other than Geneva herself, which meant that most if not all of those ships would soon be headed toward Geneva, if they weren’t already underway. And thanks to the Cho-ta’an’s ability to use the human-constructed gates, those ships were now effectively much closer to Geneva than they’d been a week ago.

  And yet, there were a finite number of jumpgates, spread across many light years—twelve human-constructed gates and perhaps nineteen Cho-ta’an gates. To reach the Geneva gate, a Cho-ta’an ship had to first reach one of the other gates, and most of the useable real estate in the galaxy was many millions of kilometers from the nearest gate. The reason for this was simple: building a jumpgate—a three-hundred-meter-diameter torus composed of 100,000 metric tons of titanium and aluminum, was astoundingly expensive, even for an organization with the resources of the IDL. In fact, because of the focus on the war effort, no new gates had been built in the past twelve years. Only one in three star systems inhabited by humans had a jumpgate in-system; usually a single ju
mpgate serviced that system as well as several others nearby. “Nearby” was a relative term: an inhabited system might be as many as three light-years away.

  To get to the Geneva system before the seedships departed, the Cho-ta’an ships had accelerated hard, probably for several weeks, to get to the nearest gate as quickly as possible. After going through the origin gate, they had emerged in the Geneva system, their velocity relative to the Geneva gate the same as their velocity relative to the origin gate. The problem for the Cho-ta’an was that traveling at 4700 kilometers per second, they couldn’t possibly decelerate fast enough to execute an effective attack on ships in orbit around Geneva. So they would decelerate at a reasonable rate and arc around the sun, using its gravity to further slow them down and redirect them back toward the target.

  “To summarize,” Huiskamp said, scanning the graphical display over Lee’s head, “in fifty-two hours, the Cho-ta’an ships will pass the seedships, probably not close enough to do any damage to them. In sixty-two hours, the seedships will achieve orbit over Geneva. In sixty-eight hours, the Cho-ta’an will reach perihelion on the other side of the sun and begin arcing back toward us. Assuming they intend to attack the seedships, they’ll be in range in a hundred and eight hours.”

  “That’s accurate based on current trajectories and acceleration, sir.”

  “In your opinion, do we have sufficient forces in-system to defend three seedships from attack by twenty-four Cho-ta’an ships?”