Unlike Reyes and O’Brien, Gabe had never married, which was not to say that he was a stranger to the women of Svartalfheim. Tall, muscular, and ruggedly good-looking, Gabe received plenty of propositions, and although he retained a cool, professional demeanor in public, rumors had circulated since their time in Normandy that Gabe acquiesced to more than a few of them. At least a dozen women at Svartalfheim had hinted—or stated flatly—that Gabe was the father of one or more of their children, and several others bore hints of his likeness.
Neither extramarital sex nor illegitimate children were particularly taboo in Norse society, and all the less so at Svartalfheim, where food was plentiful and procreation was strongly encouraged. As Gabe avoided fraternizing with married women and there were far more single women than men on campus, Reyes turned a blind eye to his habits. The truth was, O’Brien mused as he listened to his old friend calmly explain he workings of the rifle to his son, they could do worse than having a hundred little Gabes running around.
Gabe fired a few rounds first, and when he was satisfied that the gun was operating correctly, handed it to Michael. There wasn’t anything to shoot at out here but the occasional mouse or seagull, but Michael didn’t care. He happily blasted away at the ground some thirty yards away, grinning when the bullet kicked up a cloud of dust.
“How many breech-loaders do you think you’ll be able to spare for the oil expedition?” O’Brien asked, when Michael paused to reload.
“Breech-loaders? Nah, I’m giving you these babies. As many as I can crank out before you leave, anyway.”
“I figured you were saving these for your defense force.”
Gabe shook his head. “You’re more likely to need to defend yourself than we are. Besides, the breech-loaders can be tricky, and my guys are well-trained on them. The Winchesters are idiot-proof.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, and I appreciate your help, Gabe. I’m going to need all of it I can get.”
Gabe grinned. “Drilling for oil in Indian territory 600 years before Columbus? What could go wrong?”
Chapter Eleven
Dorian’s engineers finished work on the drilling rig by the last week of August. The rig consisted of a wood-and-steel derrick that would direct an iron shaft, tipped with a steel drill bit, vertically into the ground. The shaft could be extended with ten-foot segments up to a total length of a hundred and twenty feet. As the first oil wells on the Gulf Coast had been less than fifty feet deep, this was deemed more than sufficient. The drill would be driven by a team of four mules. The mules would be needed anyway to carry barrels of oil overland from the well, and there was no time to design a portable steam engine for the purpose. It was assumed the mules would be replaced by a diesel engine once it was producing.
O’Brien helped Dorian assemble the rig and test it in the hills north of Svartalfheim. When they were satisfied that it would drill through bedrock, they began the work of disassembling it and transporting the components to the shore at Höfn to be loaded into the karve they would be taking to Nova Scotia. Only the metal components and a few finely engineered wooden parts would be transported; the structural framework for the derrick and the structure to house the mules would be assembled onsite, from lumber taken from Camp Orville.
While they worked, O’Brien kept an eye on the activity at the campus below, hoping for a sign that Helena had returned from her recruiting mission. She had been due back three days earlier, but of course Viking expeditions rarely kept to a tight schedule. Adverse weather or a hundred other factors could account for the delay. Still, O’Brien worried and watched the bustling activity below.
Svartalfheim was an impressive settlement, by medieval standards. Although they were a long way from being able to build a spacecraft, they had made a lot of progress over the past twenty years. Starting with a crew of three spacemen, they had built the largest industrial operation on Earth. And yet, he reminded himself, whether they succeeded or failed, it would all be obliterated in the not-too-distant future.
According to historical records, in the year 939 the Eldgja volcano erupted, covering much of Iceland in lava. The eruption, which lasted for a year and a half, threw so much smoke and ash was into the air that reports of a “blood-red sun” were recorded as far away as Italy. No first-hand accounts of the eruption survived, but it was assumed that many settlements in Iceland were wiped out. Nor was this the only natural threat to Svartalfheim: in the thirteenth century, the “Little Ice Age” would begin, coinciding with a growth in Atlantic sea ice and an advancement of glaciers. Whatever might remain of Svartalfheim after the Eldgja eruption would, by the end of the medieval era, be completely covered by a mountain of snow and ice and would remain so until the ice retreated in the twenty-first century.
The hard limit imposed by the Eldgja eruption was, somewhat perversely, one of the reasons the spacemen had selected the location of Camp Armstrong. Since crashing in Norway, the spacemen had found themselves up against what Gabe had cheekily named LOKI: the Limitations Of Known Information. LOKI was, simply put, a codification of the principle that time travel doesn’t permit paradoxes.
LOKI gave rise to a sort of inverted understanding of causality: when considering a course of action, the Dvergar had to consider not only the intrinsic risks but also whether or not the course of action contradicted future history. So, for example, in 891 Reyes had ordered the evacuation of an agricultural site near Brussels, in anticipation of Emperor Arnulf’s decisive defeat of the Vikings there. With their foreknowledge of Arnulf’s movements and tactics, the Vikings might have been able to halt the emperor’s advance, but history told them Arnulf had been victorious. Given their past experience, Reyes had treated Arnulf’s victory as an immutable fact—a Limitation Of Known Information. Unless the historical accounts of Arnulf’s victory were inexplicably inaccurate, the Vikings had not prevailed, and the fact that they had not prevailed implied that they could not prevail, no matter what foreknowledge they had. Rather than tempt history to prove the no-paradox rule, Reyes had cut their losses and moved the operation.
This sort of thinking infused everything they did on Pleiades, causing them to think in terms of minimizing what they referred to as their “temporal footprint.” The larger their footprint, the higher the likelihood of failure. As far as recorded history was concerned, no spacecraft had launched during the Middle Ages, which meant that if it had happened, the people responsible had been very sneaky about it. Further, no evidence of pre-industrial space program had ever been found, so if it had existed, it must either have been completely destroyed or it had been located somewhere that was inaccessible for most of history. The site of Svartalfheim was both, and by the twisted logic of LOKI, that meant Pleiades had at least a remote chance of success.
The whims of LOKI threatened O’Brien’s oil-seeking expedition as well: if a large-scale oil-drilling operation had been established in Virginia, some sign of it would likely have survived to be discovered by later European settlers. For this reason, the operation would have to be as small and inconspicuous as possible while still capable of producing the fuel Iron Dragon needed. Except for the drill bit itself, no steel or other durable materials were used for the rig: iron would rust and wood would rot, leaving little for future archaeologists to find. LOKI, as much as the Cho-ta’an, drove the project’s need for secrecy.
The sun had dipped below the hills by the time the rig was disassembled. O’Brien, exhausted, made his way home while Dorian and his engineers oversaw the transport of the components. The metal pieces would be packed in grease and wrapped in cloth to prevent them from corroding on the journey. Most of the rest of the supplies had already been packed; at this point they were only waiting for some shipments of fresh provisions from Normandy. The expedition would depart in one week.
O’Brien arrived home to find that Helena still had not returned. Michael was off camping with his friend Runar, so O’Brien heated some leftover
stew on the wood-burning stove, ate dinner alone, and went to bed. He dreamed of the crash of the lander, as he had many times in the past, but this time as the wounded craft soared over the North Sea, he looked down to see Helena, bobbing in the waves, calling for him to help her. He could only watch helplessly as she succumbed to exhaustion and sank to into the black depths of the sea. He could see her as she sank, a blue shade enveloped by nothingness, coming to rest on the sea floor with all the other shades. He saw Michael there, as well as his own wife Cara and their two children, Jason and Irena, and all the rest of the multitudes of humanity, translucent shades frozen for eternity, their eyes affixed on him. As the mountainous landscape of Norway loomed ahead of him, he wished for death. The lander struck the snowy ground and he jerked awake, finding himself alone in a strange bed, in a strange house, on a strange island on a strange planet. The sky was an indeterminate gray. O’Brien got out of bed and went to work.
He had little to do for the next two days, as Camp Yeager was out of his hands and he’d done all he could to prepare for the voyage to Nova Scotia. He spent the morning at the house, reading about the Indian tribes of North America. Michael returned just before noon, and they ate lunch together and then spent the afternoon walking in the hills and practicing with the Winchester. Michael was already a better shot than O’Brien.
Helena returned that evening. The expedition to Kiev had been eventful, but not particularly productive. Kiev had recently fallen under Norse control, and while the chieftain laying claim to the city was ostensibly on good terms with Harald, the local politics were too unsettled for Helena to safely recruit engineers. Representing herself as an emissary from a commercial venture with holdings throughout western Europe, she had been invited to stay as long as she liked by the chief. Given the importance of Kiev in controlling trade through the Slavic territories, she had opted to stay for a month rather than continue overland to Magyar territory to the south. In the end, this goodwill was all the trip produced: except for some jewelry, wood carvings and a couple of barrels of vodka, the expedition returned empty-handed.
O’Brien spent the next day with Helena and Michael, savoring the last moments he would have with them for several months. No one knew how long the oil-seeking expedition would last, but it was unlikely they would get the well drilled before winter. O’Brien hoped to return in the spring on a karve loaded with barrels of oil, but there were too many variables to make promises. As the sun once again lazily drifted toward the horizon, O’Brien considered going to Reyes to ask her to postpone the voyage for a week. The September fifth deadline was arbitrary; they had several weeks of good weather left, and Camp Orville had months of supplies on hand. There would be no significant cost to the project to delay the voyage a week, Dorian could use the time to wrap up some other tasks that had been put on hold because of the drilling project. The real reason, of course, was that O’Brien wanted more time with Helena, and who could blame him? They’d had only a handful of days together since the spring. Did he not, as one of the founding members of Pleiades, deserve a week with his wife, after everything he had been through? He was certain that if he asked, Reyes would say yes.
In the end, though, he couldn’t make himself do it. As much as he wanted to stay with Helena, he couldn’t shake the image of her and everyone else he loved—along with the rest of humanity—entombed in blackness at the bottom of the sea. That, he knew, was the future humanity faced if the Cho-ta’an won the war. Every human being someday would die, but this was more than death. It was the destruction of a species. Extermination. Genocide. Without a future, the human race’s past meant nothing. All of humanity, tens of billions of translucent shades, trapped at the bottom of a sea of blackness for all eternity.
The next morning, O’Brien bade farewell to his wife and son and boarded a ship bound for North America.
Chapter Twelve
The voyage to Nova Scotia went as smoothly as could be expected. The prevailing winds across the Atlantic were out of the west, which meant that a ship traveling from Europe to North America had to fight both the winds and the current. The most reliable—though not the quickest—way to get from Iceland to Nova Scotia was to travel south first, to the approximate latitude of Bermuda, before heading west and then north along the coast. In the autumn, however, it was possible to take a northerly route, passing just south of Greenland, to arrive at what would eventually be Nova Scotia. This is what the knar, called Sjávarbotn, did.
The coxswain of Sjávarbotn was a dour but reliable and hearty man named Fritjof. His tangled red hair and beard blowing in the wind, Fritjof skillfully guided Sjávarbotn through calm weather and storm for three weeks, only rarely allowing himself to be relieved by his second mate, Gudmund. On the morning of their nineteenth day at sea, Gudmund spotted land, which Fritjof judged to be an outcropping of land off the east coast of Nova Scotia. They continued south for another day and then headed east. On the twenty-second day of their voyage, they approached the mouth of Green Bay, about forty miles southwest of the future site of Halifax.
Such precise navigation was possible as a result of a couple of pieces of closely guarded technology: a magnetic compass and a sextant. Only explicitly authorized individuals—generally the coxswain and the second mate—were allowed to use the devices, and they were under strict orders to toss them overboard if they ever in danger of being boarded. Since the Reyes had begun issuing the devices seventeen years earlier, they had had a few close calls, but as far as they knew, none of the compasses or sextants had fallen into unapproved hands.
O’Brien breathed a sigh of relief as Sjávarbotn entered the calm waters of the bay, leaving behind the violent waves of the North Atlantic that had assaulted them for the past three weeks. The rocky shores of the bay were lined with trees, mostly evergreens. The air was cold but the sky was clear, with a steady wind that propelled them northwest, to where the bay narrowed before widening again. This was his first trip to North America, but Fritjof, Gudmund and many of the others had many the voyage several times before, shuttling food and other supplies to Camp Orville and returning with loads of lumber and pitch. O’Brien, holding a roughly-drawn map showing the shipyard on the north side of the bay, just before the narrows, peered out from the prow of the ship, trying to match the drawing to what he was seeing. The river, called La Have, was nearly a mile across here. According to the map, it gradually narrowed as it curved north and then west over the next ten miles, until it turned into a roaring channel of fast-moving water about three hundred feet wide. That’s where they would find Camp Orville.
After some two hours of peering from the prow, O’Brien noticed an inlet that he thought might be the location of the shipbuilding operation. Glimpsing what he thought was a partially built snekkja on the shore, he opened his mouth to point it out to Fritjof but was silenced with a shout.
“O’Brien, get down!”
O’Brien, confused, turned to look at Fritjof.
“Down!” Fritjof shouted again. “Men, ready your arms!” His admonition was followed by the rapping of stones striking wood: Thack! Thack! Thack!
O’Brien, belatedly realizing arrows were being fired at Sjávarbotn, hit the deck. He’d survived enough battles to have shed any need to prove his bravery or manliness, and in any case, if he was killed, this mission would likely die with him. Dorian, emaciated and pale from fighting seasickness for three weeks, was the only other member of the expedition with the technical expertise to drill an oil well, and O’Brien doubted he had the wherewithal to see the mission through on his own.
A shout in a strange language sounded from across the bay, and Fritjof, standing defiantly at the stern, answered in the same tongue. The rest of the crew hunched with their heads and shoulders just above the gunwales, gripping their bows. Gabe had equipped six of the men—in addition to O’Brien—with Winchesters, but these remained wrapped in oilcloth in the ship’s hold. The guns were too susceptible to corrosion to be kept loose during the voyage. In addition t
o his bow, each man had a sword, spear or axe. Swords were uncommon among Norsemen, but less so among those employed by Pleiades: swords and other high-quality steel weapons were given out as rewards for loyalty and outstanding service. The fact that there were a dozen men brandishing swords on Sjávarbotn spoke well for the crew.
The hostilities having ceased for the moment, O’Brien ventured a glance above the gunwale. He saw some two dozen canoes, each bearing two men, skimming across the water from both sides of Sjávarbotn, converging on her position. The men, naked from the waist up, were lean, muscular and dark-haired. The man at the rear of the nearest canoe, whose hair was pulled into a thick braid that rested on his back, shouted something to Sjávarbotn. O’Brien thought it was the man who had spoken before. Fritjof barked something back at the man.
O’Brien understood none of the exchange, but this wasn’t the enthusiastic greeting he’d been expecting. He was under the impression that Aengus had made peace with the local Indian tribe, but this greeting was far from friendly. Had relations soured, or were these men from another tribe?
“The Skraelings are going to escort us,” Fritjof said, sounding even more displeased than usual. Skraeling was the name the Norsemen used for the savages of Greenland and North America.
“These men work for Aengus?” O’Brien asked.
“To say they work for him is a stretch,” Fritjof said, “but I don’t believe they intend to murder us on the way.”
“So those arrows…?”
“For show,” Fritjof said. “I hope. Just don’t make any sudden movements. Men, sheathe your swords and be ready to furl the sails.”
The Voyage of the Iron Dragon Page 10