The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  “I’m coming,” said Helena, walking toward him. “I’m not young anymore either, you know.” She approached and wrapped her arms around him and Michael. Michael, having decided he’d had enough affection, wriggled free.

  “Where are you going?” O’Brien asked.

  “Runar and I are going fishing,” Michael said. “I’m already late, thanks to mother.”

  “Yes, your cruel mother, making sure you leave the house wearing shoes,” Helena said.

  “See you later!” Michael cried, already twenty yards down the path. They waved to Michael and watched him sprint away. Despite the settlement’s urgent need for more people, Michael was their only child. Helena had nearly died giving birth to him, and it was generally agreed that she was irreplaceable. They had been careful to avoid another pregnancy.

  “You’re home early,” Helena said to her husband, when the boy had disappeared over the crest of a hill. “Is everything all right?”

  “No,” O’Brien replied. “But I can’t talk about it until I’ve briefed Reyes.” This wasn’t technically true; Helena was a member of the Operations Committee, which meant she was privy to any information related to Pleiades. But O’Brien didn’t want to waste what little time he had with Helena talking about the disaster at Camp Yeager.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, concerned at his serious demeanor.

  “Just let me look at you,” he said. He took a step back, holding her at arm’s length to study her face.

  “Stop it,” she said, averting her eyes. Her face was flushed.

  “Breathtaking,” O’Brien said, and he meant it. Helena was, in his opinion the most beautiful woman at Camp Armstrong—and probably the most beautiful woman in all Iceland. If anything, she was more beautiful than she had been when he met her as a young woman nineteen years earlier. “I’m lodging a formal complaint,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Hoarding of resources,” O’Brien replied. “It’s not fair of you to walk around flaunting your gorgeousness when others have so little.”

  “For heaven’s sake, stop it,” Helena replied, rolling her eyes.

  “I’m just glad I got to see you before you go. When do you leave?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Helena said. “You almost missed me.”

  “I did miss you. And I’ll miss you again when you leave. How long this time? A month?”

  “At least. If Kiev doesn’t pan out, we plan to continue south overland to Magyar territory.”

  “Is that really necessary? Surely there are sufficient candidates in England, Frankia and Leon?”

  “It’s not just about numbers. You know that. We’ve been getting lazy, assuming that the Cho-ta’an are dead or have lost interest in us. But as far as we know, they’re just biding their time. All they have to do is follow one supply shipment back to Höfn….”

  “And how is recruiting from the hinterlands of Europe going to help prevent that?”

  “Don’t play dumb, O’Brien,” Helena said. Like everyone else at Svartalfheim, she still referred to him by his surname. He suspected most of the settlers didn’t know he had another name. “Decentralization. The wider we cast our net, the harder it is to pinpoint our location.”

  “Except that we bring all the recruits back to Höfn.”

  “Only the Tier Ones and Tier Twos,” Helena said, referring to those who were brought to Höfn with the intent of training them to perform high-level tasks in service of Pleiades. Tier Ones were generally mathematicians or engineers who were recruited for specific tasks at Svartalfheim. Tier Twos were the young women (and occasionally men) who were vetted at Höfn before being selected for additional training. Tier Threes were everybody else—usually manual laborers who had no idea who they were working for or why. The coal miners at Camp Yeager, the lumberjacks at Camp Orville, and the silver miners at Camp Grissom were all Tier Threes. “And eventually,” Helena went on, “we’ll be able to start vetting Tier Twos at satellite locations. The more we decentralize—”

  “Offsite training has its own risks,” O’Brien reminded her. “This whole operation depends on the strict control of information.”

  Helena nodded. “Which is why we need to start talking about ramping up our disinformation efforts and establishing decoy sites. If we create enough noise—”

  “Okay, stop,” O’Brien said, holding up his hand. He’d heard this spiel from Helena before, and while he sympathized, the fact was that they only had so many resources to go around—and time remained their greatest enemy. Every year that passed, the settlers got a little more comfortable and the goal of stopping the extermination of the human race in an interstellar war in the distant future became less pressing. If he’d been overcautious in his management of Camp Yeager, then Helena was downright paranoid.

  “Afraid to fight a girl?” Helena teased.

  “Absolutely,” O’Brien replied. “I’m too tired to defend myself. I have to save some of my energy for being cussed out by Reyes.”

  “That bad?”

  O’Brien shrugged.

  “All right, I’ll have mercy on you. I’m on my way to Höfn to get some interviews done before I leave. See you at home tonight?”

  “If Reyes doesn’t tear my head off, yes.”

  “Good luck,” she said, giving him a hug. “I’ll see you later.”

  O’Brien turned and watched Helena continue down the path for some time. Then he took a deep breath and walked the rest of the way to the administration building. He went inside and walked up the stairs to Reyes’s office. He knocked at her door, and Reyes barked “Come in!” She glanced up from a stack of papers as he opened the door, groaning as she recognized him.

  “Nice to see you too, Chief,” he said, taking a seat on one of the wooden chairs in front of her desk.

  “Out with it,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Cave-in. Happened just before I got there. The good news is that we rescued most of the men.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “The mine’s out of commission.”

  “For how long?”

  “Permanently. Had to dig through the roof to get the men out. It’s not safe to work down there anymore. If it’s not already flooded, it soon will be. We’d have to keep the pumps running constantly, and if they fail….”

  “The men will drown, yeah. Well, fuck.” She sighed heavily and leaned back in her chair. Every time O’Brien saw Reyes after being away from Camp Yeager, she looked a little older. He could swear she had aged visibly in the past week alone. Over the past twenty years, her hair had gone almost completely gray and she had heavy bags under her eyes. “How long until you can have another mine up and running?”

  “Three months,” O’Brien said. “Possibly longer, if there are complications.”

  Reyes nodded. She didn’t look happy, but she wasn’t screaming at him, so that was good, he supposed. It unsettled him a little that she wasn’t more visibly upset. Her cold resignation looked a little too much like acceptance of defeat. The struggles they’d faced over the past twenty-two years had weighed heavily on her, and O’Brien couldn’t help wondering if she was just going through the motions at this point. Did she still believe in the possibility of the Iron Dragon?

  “All right, I’ll call an emergency meeting of the Operations Committee tonight, while Helena’s still here. Aengus has been looking into alternative fuel sources. Maybe he has some ideas for a stopgap solution until we get the new mine producing.”

  O’Brien nodded. “There’s something else,” O’Brien he blurted out, before he could change his mind.

  “Of course there is,” Reyes said, rubbing her forehead with her palm.

  “We had to use the digger to get the men out.”

  “Had to?”

  “I made the call,” O’Brien said. “There was no time to make sure the area was clear.”

  “All right,” Reyes said, but her tone didn’t exude approval.

  “Somebody saw us. Saw it. A p
riest, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m fairly certain. He’d been to the camp before, proselytizing. The men would always chase him away.”

  “And this time? Did anyone go after him?”

  “There was no time.”

  Reyes shook her head tiredly. “So now we’ve got a priest running around Scotland with knowledge of technology that shouldn’t exist for another eight-hundred years.”

  “I’m afraid so,” O’Brien said. “Although I can’t imagine what he’d do with that information. In any case, I’m going to send a team to disassemble the digger and bring it back her as soon as I can.”

  “Where is the new mine?”

  “I’m sorry?” O’Brien asked.

  “The new mine you’re digging. Where is it?”

  “About two hundred yards west of the current mine.”

  “You don’t think it would be wise to relocate?”

  O’Brien didn’t speak for a moment. He hadn’t actually considered the possibility. It was going to set them back months just to dig another mine in the same location. Relocating meant finding another coal field, working with Harald to make political arrangements, and moving all their personnel and equipment. It could easily take a year or more. “Honestly, I doubt the priest is going to cause us any trouble,” he said. “If he says something, nobody is going to believe him, and we’ll have the machine out of there before anyone can check out his story in any case.”

  Reyes didn’t seem entirely convinced, but she nodded. “All right. We’ll discuss it further in the meeting tonight. Next door, after supper. Is there anything else?”

  “No, ma’am,” O’Brien said, getting to his feet.

  “Good. I’ve got a lot of work to do before then.” She stared helplessly at the papers on her desk.

  O’Brien opened the door, hesitating before walking out. “It really is good to see you, Chief,” he said.

  Reyes nodded, but didn’t look up. O’Brien left the room and closed the door behind him.

  Chapter Seven

  O’Brien was late for the meeting, which was not ideal considering that his report to Reyes was the reason it was called in the first place. He had no regrets, though: Helena had returned from her interviews just before dinner, when Michael was still gone fishing, giving them about ten minutes alone together. It was their last time together before Helena left for the Baltic.

  He ran the quarter-mile from their house to the administration building and was still out of breath when he entered the conference room to find the others waiting for him. Red-faced, he apologized and took his seat. Fortunately, everyone seemed to be in a good mood, and the room burst into laughter when Helena, looking only slightly more composed, walked into the room two minutes later.

  “I apologize for the late start,” Reyes deadpanned. “It seems that another meeting went long.”

  “Sorry, Chief,” O’Brien said.

  Reyes nodded. “Let’s get down to business. I know we’re all busy, but as some of you have already heard, we’ve had a complication at Camp Yeager. O’Brien, would you brief us?”

  “Yes, Chief,” O’Brien said, and proceeded to give an accounting of the events at Camp Yeager. Knowing his audience, he delivered a thorough, chronological narrative of the cave-in and rescue rather than the just-the-facts version he’d given to Reyes. Ultimately Reyes had sole authority over Pleiades; the Committee existed only to advise and report to her. But Reyes generally deferred to the expertise of the committee members, so they controlled the direction of the project.

  In O’Brien’s mind it was important for the Committee to understand the human element of the disaster, and not see it simply as a setback in their efforts to secure a steady flow of fossil fuels. This was a battle he had been fighting for years: as the nominal Secretary for Raw Materials, his performance tended to be measured in terms of how much material he produced: how many tons of coal, bog iron or bauxite; how many pounds of gold, silver and copper; how many board-feet of lumber. What these numbers didn’t reveal, however, was the cost of these resources: totaling up casualties across all of the operations O’Brien oversaw, he had lost thirty-eight men in the past twenty years. Many more had been permanently disabled. No other department—even Eirik’s euphemistically-named Resource Appropriation, which raided the coasts of Frankia and England for wealth and personnel—came close to those kinds of numbers.

  The fact was that in medieval Europe, people were cheap. For every miner that was lost, there were a hundred more men willing to do the job for a silver coin a week. And thanks to the spacemen’s knowledge of the locations of hidden deposits of gold and silver all over Europe, they were never short of cash. But the men at Camp Yeager hadn’t worked eighteen hours a day for five days straight for silver: they had done it because their brothers were trapped in a tomb. There was a value in that sort of loyalty and devotion that wouldn’t show up on a ledger. And ultimately, if Pleiades was going to succeed, it was going to take a lot more than lumber, coal and gold. It was going to require the sort of untiring commitment and camaraderie shown by the miners at Camp Yeager.

  Few of the men working in the mines and mills that O’Brien oversaw would ever know the true nature of the project they were supporting, but O’Brien had come to believe it didn’t matter. Whatever the miners at Camp Yeager suspected about him or where the coal ended up, they knew that he believed in something that mattered—something that made spending half their lives underground digging coal worthwhile. If O’Brien had thought those men’s lives were just numbers on a ledger, he’d never have ruined the mine to get them out. In reality, it would have been cheaper and easier to replace them. The deaths of several men would hurt morale, of course, but the miners would get over that. What they wouldn’t get over was the impression that they didn’t matter—that they were just replaceable cogs in a machine designed to produce fuel for some mysterious purpose they could never understand. The men needed to know they mattered.

  It occurred to him as he related the story of the rescue to his fellow Committee members that this sense of purpose—the miners’ belief that they were each an essential element in something very important—may have been the reason they always chased away the priest. Medieval Europe had been fertile ground for the spread of Christianity because it told peasants and serfs that they mattered, no matter their social status. Each of the had an eternal soul, each of them was a vital part of the Church, and each of them had a reward waiting in heaven. In a way, Pleiades had become a sort of cult, immunizing its adherents against Christianity. The average miner or lumberman working on Pleiades knew as little about spaceships as the average medieval Church-goer knew about the teachings of St. Augustine, but that was of little importance: what mattered was that they were part of something bigger than themselves.

  When he got to the end of the story, he hesitated, glancing at Reyes. Reyes met his glance, expressionless, and he decided to err on the side of caution. He wasn’t sure Reyes would want to worry the others with a security concern that they couldn’t do much about. He figured Reyes had probably already briefed Gabe and Joseph Poncella, who were in charge of Security and Intelligence, respectively, about the priest. If she wanted to bring up a security concern in an Operations Committee meeting, that was her prerogative, but he wasn’t going to be the one to broach the subject. He wrapped up his story, noting that it would be at least three months before another mine could be up and running.

  “Well, thank God you got out of there safely,” Gabe said. “You and the men.”

  “Most of them,” Helena said quietly. O’Brien met her glance to see the appreciation in her eye. He’d avoided looking at her until now; this was the first chance he’d had to tell her the full story. She, at least, understood.

  “We’re all very happy you made it back,” Reyes said. “And for what it’s worth, in my mind you made the right call.”

  There were murmurs of agreement from around the table, and O’Brien nodded appreciatively
.

  “That said,” Reyes went on, “we are now in a very bad position, energy-wise. Most of the basic fabrication work can continue, thanks to Ibrahim’s work converting it to geothermal, but any work that relies on coal is going to have to be approved on a case-by-case basis. If we ration, we might be able to limp along until the new mine is producing.”

  Energy had been a problem since the inauguration of Pleiades. It became clear early on that Iceland’s geothermal resources, vast though they were, would not suffice to supply the project’s energy needs. There was no practical way use geothermal energy to heat a forge, so the blacksmiths at Höfn went through massive amounts of coal to forge iron and steel parts for machines. Geothermal energy was also impractical for powering vehicles and mobile machinery. Besides the astronomical amounts of fuel that would eventually be required for testing rockets, in order to build the infrastructure for its space program the settlement was going to require an arsenal of earth-movers, drills, pumps, tractors and other mobile machinery, all of which would have to be powered by fossil fuels. In the first years of the project, Reyes had done some experiments with electric motors powered by nickel-cadmium batteries charged by a geothermal generator, but these had proved impractical for large-scale industrial purposes. Internal combustion engines would have been an obvious solution, but liquid fossil fuels were decidedly difficult to come by in medieval Europe.

  “Construction of new houses will have to cease,” said an olive-skinned man on the far side of the table from O’Brien. This was Nestor, a Greek engineer who was one of the first of Helena’s recruits, nineteen years earlier. After toiling away in Hell for ten years, designing tools and machinery, he had been promoted to Secretary for Facilities and Construction. His biggest challenge over the past year was accommodating Camp Yeager’s burgeoning population. In addition to Helena’s and Eirik’s recruits, the population was being supplemented by scores of newborns every year.

  “You can do most of the work by hand, can’t you?” Reyes asked.