Chapter Fifty-seven
Lauren Foley stood with the other colonists gathered around the fountain on the garden level, holding a sedative pill in her hands. She had already given one to each of the other colonists, per Olson’s orders, but was resisting taking one herself. As usual, she had been left in the dark about the plan. New captain, same as the old captain. “It will reduce your oxygen consumption,” Olson had explained, as if she didn’t know how a sedative worked. “But why?” she had asked. He’d abruptly cut the communication, evidently having more important matters to attend to.
She regarded the newcomers, dressed in dirty, ragged gowns, most of them barefoot. At first, many of them had wandered around the park in awe while a few others huddled terrified at the base of the fountain. Now, though, the sedatives had started to take effect, and most of them were asleep, probably exhausted from their journey through the hills from Betar.
She was still having trouble believing Captain Huiskamp seriously intended to salvage the human race by absconding with a group of Jewish prostitutes and Roman soldiers. How the hell did he think that was going to work? These people didn’t even know what a spaceship was, for Christ’s sake. How was she going to explain to them that they were going to be aboard one for the rest of their lives? That in all likelihood, their descendants for the next ten or more generations were going to live and die aboard this ship? Not only were the concepts completely foreign; they couldn’t even talk to each other about more basic things. Most of the women spoke only Aramaic, and most of the Romans presumably spoke only Latin or the language of whatever province they’d grown up in. She’d been practicing Latin, but she was far from fluent, and she didn’t know a word of Aramaic, and the two groups were going to have a hell of a time trying to communicate with each other.
Languages could be learned, of course, and maybe the soldiers could be convinced that violence was not going to get them anywhere. The crew would have to sequester the Romans somewhere at first, separate from the other colonists. As the leader of the colonists, she would of course be in charge of the process of acclimating both groups to their new environment and gradually introducing them to each other. It would be tough to keep them segregated, given the close quarters, but hopefully they could begin allowing some contact between the two groups within a few weeks after launch. Before that happened, she would have to figure out how they were going to handle birth control. It wouldn’t do to have conceptions occurring as the result of random couplings before they’d even cataloged the DNA of everyone aboard. No, if they were going to have any chance at all of keeping humanity alive, all reproduction would have to be tightly controlled.
Foley sat down on the grass next to the fountain, trying to work through the problem. Ideally, they would get sperm samples from each of the Romans as soon as feasibly possible. That way, even if some of them died before…. Hm, now that was a thought. Once you got sperm from the men, you wouldn’t really need them anymore, and space was so limited aboard Freedom that it might make sense to…. She laughed to herself. The captain had been so worried about selective abortion. How would he feel about selective murder? But then, the captain was dead, wasn’t he? Or at least imprisoned by the Romans. There was a new captain now. New captain, same as the old captain. God, my head hurts. Why can’t I concentrate?
Two hundred men, two hundred women, give or take. The women were Jewish. Fairly insular group, genetically speaking. Not ideal. Risk of Tay-Sachs, Gaucher’s Disease and other lipid transport disorders, Riley-Day syndrome…. But those diseases are only prevalent in Ashkenazi populations. When did the Ashkenazi split from the Sephardic and Mizrahi? Will need to research. Romans…. Well, who knows where this legion came from? Northern Europeans were pretty insular too. Africa would have been better. Sickle cell, yes, but immunity to malaria. Probably not a lot of malaria in space. Malaria abhors a vacuum. Head is killing me. So tired.
A door opened, and Roman soldiers began to pour into the park. They only got a few steps before they started to stumble and fall, panting as if they couldn’t catch their breath. Foley saw now that the women and the other colonists were all asleep. She looked down, saw the pill in her hand. Someone had told her to take it, but why? Something about oxygen. The soldiers continued to fall. Better take the pill, she thought, and tried to bring it to her mouth, but her hand was so, so heavy. She fell asleep.
*****
Legatus Gaius Aemelius Numisius awoke with a start in a strange room filled with moving pictures and tiny lights of many different colors that blinked on and off in a rhythm too precise for any flame. He sat in a chair that would have been quite comfortable were his forearms and ankles not secured to it with straps. The straps didn’t look like much, but fighting against them had no effect but intensifying the pain in his head. His armor had been removed, and he’d been disarmed.
How had he gotten here? He remembered marching with his legion southward on the road from Caesarea to Betar. A sharp-eyed scout had pointed out the strange silvery cone protruding from the water, and not much later he had seen a group of people on the beach. Women, mostly, apparently Jewish refugees. They were fleeing on boats to… the tower? He didn’t know what the tower was or where it had come from, but he knew it needed to be claimed in the name of the Emperor. He’d sent a single cohort to take the tower, but they’d been routed by men wielding powerful weapons. The defenders seemed to be few, though, and they only held one small stretch of beach. He sent the bulk of the legion to crush them while directing a single cohort to seize the boats along the shore to the north. When the vanguard reported back that they’d met no resistance on the way to the tower and had secured the first two levels, Gaius came over to see it himself. His men had not seen any of the scores of women who had gone inside, suggesting that most of the tower was underwater. Unless it was built on pontoons like some Roman bridges, it had to be incredibly vast. What a treasure for Rome! A steel tower, as tall as stadium was wide, most of it underwater, would be an impregnable fortress if one had the sense to keep the doors closed. The Emperor might even want to make it into his personal palace and the new center of the Empire.
Gaius’s men had descended from one level to the next with impunity, their advance slowed only by one of the odd sliding doors that proved simple enough to pry open. Despite the lack of resistance, many of Gaius’s men were panting by the time they reached the fifth level down. By now they had to be beneath the level of the water; he wondered if the air was thinner at such depths, as it was in the mountains. At last they reached a vast indoor garden, where they found the refugees, as well as several other strangely dressed women, all lazing about on the grass. Most seemed to be asleep; none showed any fear of the soldiers advancing across the lawn toward them.
One of the men stumbled and fell to his hands and knees in the grass. Gaius intended to order the man to get up, but he was suddenly overcome with dizziness. Two more men fell, and Gaius realized too late that they had walked into a trap. The builders of the tower had released some kind of poison into the air. If that were the case, though, the refugees would die too. Why bring them to this place just to kill them? It was the last coherent thought that went through his head before he lost consciousness.
A woman’s voice spoke behind him, a language he did not recognize. A man, his left arm in a sling, stepped into view. The man was big and fair-skinned like the Northmen Gaius had seen. The man said something in the same strange language, whether to him or the woman, Gaius didn’t know.
“I am the Legatus of the Ninth Legion, operating in Judaea with the full backing of the Emperor himself,” said Gaius, with as much authority as he could muster. “Release me now and your deaths will be swift.”
The man smiled grimly. He tapped his chest. “Captain Olson,” he said, “of ship Freedom.”
Ship? thought Gaius. What ship? Was he speaking of the tower? The name was odd, too. “Frijadom?” he asked.
The man nodded. “Freedom.”
“You speak the langua
ge of the Saxons?” he asked in that tongue.
The man stared at him.
Evidently not. Still, there was definitely a hint of the Saxon language in the man’s speech. He seemed to want to speak Latin, however, although his vocabulary was clearly limited. “This is a ship?”
“A ship, yes,” said the man who called himself Olson. “Not water ship. Sky ship.”
Sky ship? He wondered if Olson understood what he was saying. “This ‘ship,’” said Gaius, “belongs to the Emperor. You will release me and surrender Frijadom to me.”
Olson shook his head. “Freedom leave. You leave on Freedom.”
So that was their game! They intended to take him back to their kingdom, either to torture him for information or to ransom him. Either way, they would be disappointed. Gaius would never betray the Empire, and the Emperor would not pay a single denarius in ransom. More likely, he would declare war on them. But from what kingdom did they hail? He had heard of the wonders of Chinese engineering, but he doubted even the Chinese could build a tower—ship?—like this. “Where do you plan to take me?”
Olson smiled again. “I show you,” he said.
Chapter Fifty-eight
“Are we ready to launch, Commander Gleeson?”
“Aye, Captain. Ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Power up the reactor.”
“Aye, sir. We’ll be running on chambers one through seven for the launch. I’ll bring number eight online just before we reach the stratosphere, and then I’ll jettison three. God willing, we’ll reach escape velocity before eight blows, or this is going to be a short trip.”
“Think positive, Gleeson.”
“Aye, sir.”
Olson and Schwartz took their seats and secured their restraints. A few minutes later, Gleeson informed him that reactor chambers one through seven were online. Ordinarily, there was a series of checks they would go through before engaging the thrusters, but with chamber three well on its way to melting down, there was no time. They would just have to engage and hope for the best.
The bridge rumbled as the main thrusters engaged. Schwartz sat next to him, and just ahead of them was the man who called himself Gaius Aemelius Numisius, the commander of the Roman Ninth Legion. Probably thinking the ‘tower’ was about to shake itself to pieces, Gaius fought anew against his restraints, again without success. Acceleration pressed them into their chairs, and Gaius forgot to struggle. He stared open-mouthed at the various screens ahead of him, which depicted the views from cameras placed inside Freedom and on her hull. One, still underwater, showed the plume of fire blasting from Freedom’s tail. Another showed the clear blue sky above them, and another a view of the rest of the Ninth Legion, gathered a short distance off the shore, watching the launch.
The amount of information on the screens had to be overwhelming for a man from the second century; Olson could only hope Gaius understood on some basic level what was happening. There had been no point in trying to explain it to him. Even if Olson had possessed the requisite vocabulary, Gaius never would have believed him. Ultimately, all Gaius needed to know was that he and his men were never going to return to Judaea, nor to Rome, nor even to Earth. The sooner he stopped thinking in terms of his loyalty to the Roman Empire, the easier it would be for them all.
One of the screens showed the garden level, where his men slept, along with the refugees and the other colonists. After the oxygen content had been restored to normal levels, Schwartz, Olson, and the other remaining crew members aboard Freedom had used hypo syringes to administer sedatives to those who weren’t already sedated. It would have been impossible to get them all restrained properly for the launch; sedation and a soft bed of artificial turf would have to do. Hopefully none of them would suffer any long-term effects from hypoxia. The refugees and colonists—with the exception of pig-headed Lauren Foley—had at least been sedated before Gleeson dropped the oxygen level throughout most of the ship.
A jolt of acceleration pushed Olson deeper into the padding of his chair, and most of the cameras were obscured for a few seconds as Freedom left the water. When they could see again, a massive cloud of steam hung over the water below them, billowing toward the beach. The soldiers fled inland en masse but couldn’t escape it. By the time the steam cleared, Freedom was too far up for them to see what had happened to the men. The captain and the other men were down there somewhere, but there was nothing Olson could do for them anymore.
Just over two minutes into the launch, Gleeson’s voice came over the comm again: “Olson, we’ve got a problem.”
“What is it?”
“Chamber three is getting hot faster than expected. I’m going to have to jettison it early.”
Olson looked at the nav display. It would take at least another seven minutes of near-maximum thrust to reach escape velocity. “Can we make it the rest of the way on number eight?”
“I don’t know, sir. Maybe. But number three isn’t going to last another three minutes.”
“Understood. Wait as long as you can, then jettison it.”
“Sir, there’s something else. If we jettison it at this altitude….”
“Jesus,” said Olson, realizing what Gleeson was getting at. There was no way around it, though. Either they dumped the damaged reactor chamber before it melted down, or Freedom would explode with everyone on it. “Do what you need to do, Gleeson.”
“The captain….”
“The captain would want us to complete the mission,” Olson said. And he and the others would probably thank us for a swift death at this point. “Do what you need to do. I take full responsibility.”
“Yes, sir.”
*****
A roar like persistent thunder sounded in Jason’s ears, distracting him from the pain in his hand. Flavius Decius straightened and made it two steps to the door before the tent was torn from its stakes by a blast of hot wind. Jason fell face-first to the sand as scalding steam and sand whipped over him. A few seconds later, the wind died and the steam dissipated. Decius and the other two men were on their hands and knees, groaning. Their skin not covered by the armor was red with burns. Most of Jason’s body was burned, but the sharp pain was almost a relief from the incessant throbbing in his hand.
The roar lessened a bit, and Jason could hear screams from the men closer to the water. Blinking sand from his eyes, Jason sat up and turned to see Freedom arcing into the sky on a plume of flame. All around him, soldiers were slowly getting to their feet, staring in awe at the silver needle receding skyward. Thoughts of escape faded as Jason glanced around to see hundreds of soldiers in all directions. Their distraction wouldn’t last much longer, and in any case, there was nowhere to go. Better to look for an opportunity to filch a gladius to fall upon than to waste time fantasizing about escape.
Flavius Decius stood next to Jason, amazement on his face giving way to a realization that Jason had been telling the truth. “Sky ship,” he murmured.
Freedom was now just a speck in the sky. We did it, thought Jason. Humanity wasn’t saved yet, but at least we have a chance.
But as he watched, Freedom began to fall, the mid-morning sun glinting off its hull as it arced toward the Mediterranean.
No, thought Jason. No. Please, it can’t be.
It wasn’t. What he saw was not Freedom, but one of her proton reaction chambers falling to Earth. They must have jettisoned it early, Jason thought. It wasn’t the glint of the sunlight he had seen; it was the glow of a proton reactor melting down. It would get hotter and hotter until it exploded with the force of a small sun. The good news was that it looked like it was going to explode somewhere over the Mediterranean. The bad news was that Jason and his men were going to be well within the blast area.
“Do you want to know what happens to the Ninth Legion?” Jason asked Flavius Decius, who was transfixed by the glowing object dropping like a fallen angel from the heavens.
“Yes, oracle,” said the tribune in an awed voice.
“This,” said Jason.
For a split-second, they were enveloped in pure white light. Then it was over.
Chapter Fifty-nine
Freedom reached escape velocity with seconds to spare. Gleeson jettisoned reactor chamber 8, which detonated several hundred kilometers up. The flash would be momentarily visible from the surface, but it was too far up to cause any damage. That was not the case with chamber 3.
“We killed them,” Olson said, staring at Freedom’s display of the surface. Nearly two hundred kilometers up and another five hundred kilometers east, they could still make out the mushroom cloud on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. “The captain. Gutierrez. Nichols. Pirelli. All those soldiers. My God, thousands of them.”
“And the fishermen,” said Schwartz. “Anybody within a kilometer of ground zero. But we had no choice, Olson. The people aboard this ship are the only chance humanity has.”
“Yeah,” said Olson, sounding unconvinced. “This is what happens when you fuck with history, I guess.” He glanced over at Gaius, whose face had gone completely white. He sat, mute and unblinking, staring at the screens.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think the Captain was right, whether he realized it or not. History rejects paradoxes. Whatever we did was always going to happen. You know about the Ninth Legion, right?”
“The lost legion, yeah. They disappeared sometime around the Bar Kochba Revolt. Historians never figured out what happened to them.”
“Now we know.”
Schwartz shook her head. “I saw it happen, and I still don’t believe it. The Ninth Legion was taken out by a jettisoned proton reactor?”
“Sure looks that way.”
The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic Page 38