The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  “You don’t believe we can stop this cult,” said Sergius.

  “What I believe is of little consequence,” said the demon. “The cult intends to make straight a path for the coming of the antichrist. I can provide insight into those plans.”

  “For a price,” Sergius said.

  The demon held up its palms in a shrug. “A few books to ease the boredom of my incarceration. I do not ask for your souls.”

  “What are they doing with the coal?” Theo asked, hoping to redirect the interrogation to more practical matters.

  The demon smiled and recited, “‘And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’”

  “This is the falling star you spoke of,” Sergius said. “The silver thing that was seen in the north sky twenty-two years ago.”

  “A sky ship,” Gurryek said. “We were cast out of heaven, like our father Lucifer millennia ago. But we brought with us tools and knowledge, with which we intended to build a great furnace. The coal is for that furnace, which will be used to forge terrible machines that will wreak havoc and destruction across the world, preparing the way for Lucifer’s reign. My kind shall build another sky ship and return to heaven to wage war on Michael and his angels.”

  “And they will be utterly destroyed,” Sergius said.

  Gurryek shrugged again.

  “For all your prophesying,” Theo said, “you cannot tell us how many of your kind walk the Earth, nor how many people are in this cult, nor even where the cult is headquartered.”

  “My kind is secretive, and as you know, I have been cut off from my brothers for several years. I cannot tell you what I do not know.”

  “Yes, your knowledge is conveniently limited that way, isn’t it?” Theo asked.

  “Do you expect me to personally lead you to victory against my own kind? You have seen their mine. Follow the shipments to their destination. You will see that I speak the truth.”

  Chapter Ten

  Despite the coal shortage and resulting slowdown of work, the summer was a busy one at Svartalfheim. Many tasks that would have been done with coal-powered machines now had to be done by hand, or with the help of mules, horses or oxen. Meanwhile, another dozen men were dispatched to Camp Yeager to assist in construction of the new mine. O’Brien split his time between Scotland, where he oversaw progress of the mine, and Svartalfheim, where he helped to organize the oil-seeking expedition to North America.

  The plan was for O’Brien and Dorian, an engineer who had been recruited on O’Brien’s visit to Constantinople twenty years earlier, to hitch a ride on one of the supply missions from Höfn to Camp Orville, the lumber mill in Nova Scotia. The next supply mission was scheduled for the fifth of September. After resupplying Camp Orville, they would then continue south along the coast around the tip of Florida and then back north to the Gulf Coast, where petroleum deposits were plentiful. The exact location for the well had yet to be determined. Dorian was tasked with equipping the expedition with the tools they would need to drill a well, and his expertise would be needed onsite once they reached their destination. Dorian had crafted drill bits and other well-drilling tools in the past, but never for an oil well. Once onsite, the ship’s crew would be put to work drilling the well. The provisional name for the new facility was Camp Hughes.

  All the ships in the service of Pleiades were still sail-driven, which meant that a large crew was required in case winds were uncooperative. They possessed the technology to build larger, steam-powered ships, but the incremental gain in speed and efficiency was not worth the risk of being discovered. The crews of these ships were drawn mostly from a pool of some three hundred mercenary Norsemen, who knew only that they were being paid well to row and keep their mouths shut about what they were transporting and where. As with miners and other laborers, there was no shortage of men willing to sign on as oarsmen for a few weeks or month, and any man who talked too much was likely to find himself stranded on an island in the Orkneys, if not thrown overboard. Those who proved trustworthy were given more authority, at higher pay, and Eirik now had a corps of two dozen coxswains who could be trusted not to speak a work out of turn. And even if one were tempted to betray them, the shipping operations of Pleiades were such a convoluted mess, connecting ports from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, that an oarsman could toil in its service for years and have no idea where the operation was headquartered—nor even that he was working for a single organization at all. Only the most trusted crews were allowed to disembark at Höfn; most cargo was first offloaded at another port under their control, generally in Norway, Normandy, or the Viking-controlled parts of Britain. The oil-drilling crew would be selected from among these men.

  Helena was gone for much of the summer on her recruiting mission. O’Brien always worried when she left, despite the fact that she had been dozens of these missions in the past—though generally not as far as Kiev—and would be under the constant protection of a cadre of their fiercest and most loyal warriors. Fortunately, he was so busy that he had little time left over to worry.

  He saw Michael only briefly in the mornings and the evenings; the boy was constantly hunting, fishing, or exploring. Ironically, despite the proclivities of his parents, Michael showed little interest in formal schooling. It was as if the air of Iceland had infected him with the Norse spirit: for better or worse, he was Viking, through and through. At this point, Pleiades needed engineers more than it needed hunters or warriors, but O’Brien had no doubt the boy would find his place soon enough.

  One day in early August, as Michael was about to set off on another of his adventures, O’Brien suggested they might spend the day together.

  “Are you going to come hunting with me?” Michael asked. “We could hike to the point and camp there tonight.”

  “How about this,” O’Brien said. “I’ll hike to the point with you next week if you come with me today.”

  “But your work is boring. All you do is look at maps and write down numbers on paper.”

  “When you get a little more serious in your exploring, you’re going to develop an appreciation for those maps and numbers. But today we’re going to do something different. Uncle Gabe has something to show us.”

  “Are we going to Hell?” Michael asked excitedly.

  O’Brien laughed. Like many young people who hadn’t spent much time there, he was fascinated by the subterranean workshop. For O’Brien and many others who had spent far too many hours in the smoky, noisy, and dimly lit cave, the workshop’s nickname hit a little close to home. “Yes, we’ll have to stop by Hell to meet Gabe.”

  “It’s a deal,” Michael said. “Are you going to camp with me at the point?”

  “We’ll see what the weather is like,” O’Brien said. Sleeping on rocky ground was another novelty that had worn thin for him. “Finish your breakfast and we’ll go see Gabe.”

  *****

  It took them nearly half an hour to get to Hell, Michael insisting that they take the footpath that meandered through the hills to the north of the settlement. Michael carried his bow, as he always did, keeping an eye out for stray game. No large mammals were native to Iceland; the best they could hope for was a fox or mink. But they saw nothing but sheep and the sea birds circling overhead.

  O’Brien was happy with the detour, as he wasn’t in the mood to deal with people on campus. The expedition to North America had been kept a closely-held secret, which only increased the concern among workers at Svartalfheim about the impending coal shortage: nobody could understand why O’Brien was in Iceland, rather than overseeing the construction of the new mine in Scotland. In point of fact, work on the mine was continuing apace; barrin
g any more major disasters, they would have enough coal to get them through the winter. O’Brien hadn’t been to the mine for two weeks, but he had received a progress report from a returning engineer three days earlier.

  A lot could happen in three days, of course, and the lack of speedy communication across Pleiades’ satellite locations continued to be a problem, in terms of planning, logistics and security. They’d experimented with several long-range communications technologies, but all had serious drawbacks. They possessed four small radio transceivers—the IDL-issued cuffs that were still working after twenty-two years, but the effective range of the device was at most a hundred miles. They had been spoiled early on by the presence of Andrea Luhman in orbit, which allowed relaying communications anywhere within the ship’s line of sight. For the past nineteen years, though, they’d had to rely on decidedly lower tech options.

  Optical signals—such as the Byzantine beacon system—were one option. The limitation with optical systems was the curvature of the Earth: you needed a relay station every fifty miles or so, depending on the terrain. As most of their operations were located near the coasts and separated by vast stretches of water, this was untenable. Telegraph lines were not feasible, for the same reason: running cables along the bottom of the North Sea was “theoretically possible,” but posed challenges that were insurmountable given their current state of technology.

  That left amplification of radio signals, which required transistors or vacuum tubes. The production of transistors remained so far beyond the technological capabilities of the Dvergar that they might as well try to build a teleporter. Vacuum tubes, although within the realm of possibility, had proved surprisingly difficult to manufacture. Alma had a whole team devoted to the problem, using the light bulb fabrication process Reyes had devised as a starting point.

  Reyes and O’Brien had made a good start at developing an electronics infrastructure: they’d developed processes for fabricating transformers, capacitors and batteries. They had all the raw materials they needed: copper came from Camp Shepard in Sweden, and aluminum came from Camp Bell, just north of Svartalfheim. Iron, zinc, lead and tin could be purchased readily in towns throughout Europe, either in their raw form or as finished goods. Some elements could be found as impurities in other metals: cadmium in zinc, platinum in gold, and nickel in iron. Silicon was in ready supply in the form of sand. They had even stockpiled about three hundred pounds of tungsten from a small mine they’d temporarily set up in southern England shortly after the founding of Camp Armstrong. For now, they were short on plastics for insulation, but that would change when they had a regular supply of petroleum. Glass and ceramics sufficed in many cases, and some plastics could be synthesized from plants.

  Despite these advances, by Alma’s reckoning it would be another two to three years before they had tubes that worked well enough to be used in large-scale radio signal amplification. For now, information traveled between the satellite locations at the speed of sail. For this reason, O’Brien had no way of informing Aengus, in Nova Scotia, of the upcoming expedition. Three karves had departed for Camp Orville from Höfn shortly before the cave-in at Camp Yeager, and no more ships were scheduled to be sent before September. He could only hope that the three karves returned safely to Höfn, bearing lumber and news that all was well at Camp Orville, before O’Brien’s departure for the New World.

  Eventually he and Michael reached the nondescript building on the northeast end of the campus that served as the entrance to Hell. O’Brien found the key for the lock on his keyring and the two went inside. The air inside the little building was warm and smelled of sulfur and grease. O’Brien pulled open an iron gate that blocked off the rear half of the building. Michael stepped through the opening and O’Brien followed, pulling the gate closed behind them. He pressed a button the wall, and with a shudder the little room began to move slowly downward, accompanied by a clattering of chains. The elevator, like most of the machinery in Hell, was driven by a massive steam turbine powered by heat from volcanic activity in the rocks below.

  The elevator opened to reveal a gigantic cavern filled with people and machinery. In many places, the natural contours of the cave still showed, but the chamber had been enlarged and leveled in many places, making it seem almost like a purely artificial construction. Massive concrete pillars, flared at the tops and bottoms, supported the ceiling. Hundreds of haphazardly placed light bulbs hanging from the ceiling gave one the impression of being outside on a starry night—or would have, if it weren’t for the smoky, sulfurous air and near-deafening racket of the machines. Noise and poor ventilation had been problems in Hell from the beginning. The engineers were constantly upgrading the fans and widening vents in an effort to disperse the smoke generated by the forges, furnaces and kilns. They’d given up early on in their efforts to control the noise; after covering wide swathes of the ceiling and walls with wool cloth had little effect, they’d begun mandating earplugs for anyone on the floor.

  O’Brien tapped his son on the shoulder and handed him a hardhat from a shelf and a pair of earplugs from his pocket. After donning his own protective gear, O’Brien signed to Michael that he should stay close. Michael nodded, and O’Brien set out across the cavern, following a yellow line that had been painted on the floor. Workers labored at strange machines that lined the floor of the room, each man or woman performing his or her assigned task with flawless grace. There were drill presses, lathes, powered looms, saws, grinders, and a dozen other sorts of machines. Each had a wheel on one side that was connected by a cloth belt to a metal shaft some ten feet above that ran the length of the ceiling. There were six shafts in all, and six rows of machines underneath. Each of the six shafts was connected by another belt to a larger shaft above them. At the end of that shaft, in a separate cavern, was a huge flywheel that spun constantly, regulating the speed of the shaft. The flywheel was kept in motion by a gigantic geothermal steam turbine.

  O’Brien walked along the line, periodically checking to make sure his son was still with him. Over the past several years, Nestor had instituted a number of safety protocols to reduce the number of injuries and fatalities on the floor, but Hell remained a dangerous place. Not watching where one was going, or departing from the safety of the yellow line, was a good way to lose an arm or an eye.

  At the far end of the floor, O’Brien spotted the lanky figure of Gabe Zuehlsdorf, the head of security at Svartalfheim. Gabe was holding a metal tube, about an inch in diameter and two feet long, using a spinning wire brush to remove burs from the pipe’s edge. He smiled as O’Brien and Michael approached, pulling the pipe away and hitting a switch to disengage the wheel from the belt that propelled it. He pulled his goggles onto his forehead and handed the pipe to Michael.

  “You know what that is?” he asked.

  “A pipe,” Michael shouted.

  “Right, but what is it for?”

  Michael shrugged. “Water?”

  Gabe grinned. He motioned for them to follow him, and then turned and walked to the far wall. At the wall, he turned left and continued until he came to a closed door. Pulling a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door and the three of them went inside. He flipped a switch and a light bulb went on, revealing that they were in a small room furnished with an desk, two chairs, and several cabinets. These had been made for him by Sigurd from oak imported from Nova Scotia. He closed the door behind them, and the din outside subsided to a dull roar.

  “I should really be working on my threat assessment report for Reyes,” Gabe said, setting the pipe carefully on the desk, “but this is more fun.” He went to one of the cabinets and opening it, revealing a row of six rifles. He took the one on the left and held it in front of him. The gun was constructed of finely polished dark gray steel, with a stock and grip of stained walnut.

  “You’re making rifles?” Michael asked, in awe. Like anyone who had been at Svartalfheim for a while, he had seen guns, but their use was strictly controlled—more for security reasons than for saf
ety. If just one of their guns found its way into the hands of some English aristocrat, they might soon be facing a Saxon invasion. With the exception of Aengus’s expedition to Nova Scotia, which had carried twenty breech-loaded guns, no firearms were ever allowed to leave the vicinity of the camp. The guns were solely for last-ditch defensive purposes, in the case of an attack on the camp by Saxons, Cho-ta’an agents or some other belligerents.

  “Not just rifles,” Gabe said. “This is a Winchester 1873, one of the first lever-action repeating rifles. Fires over ten .44 rounds a minute with exceptional accuracy. A masterpiece of nineteenth century engineering as well as an object of unparalleled beauty.”

  “Can I touch it, Uncle Gabe?”

  “Tell you what,” Gabe said, taking a box of cartridges from a shelf. “Let’s get out of this dungeon and see what this thing can do.”

  *****

  The three took the elevator back to ground level and then hiked about half a mile into the hills, where they could fire the Winchester without disturbing anyone on campus. This is where Gabe’s defense force generally trained and tested weapons. At this distance from Höfn, gunshots could pass for thunder.

  Gabe loaded the gun, pointing out the various parts as he had to Sigurd and his men twenty-two years earlier, emphasizing that Michael should always assume a gun was loaded and should never point it at anything he didn’t want destroyed. Michael soon grew impatient, begging his “Uncle Gabe” to let him shoot the gun.

  Gabe had been “Uncle Gabe” to Michael and to Reyes’s three daughters since any of them had been able to talk. The three had no familiar relation to each other, but they shared a bond that was perhaps deeper than kinship: they were spacemen, strangers not only in a strange land, but in a strange time as well.