The problem, as with many issues facing Pleiades, was one of scale: it was almost impossible to buy the amount of vegetable oil Svartalfheim would need to get through the winter. Eirik’s men could spend all year combing markets in towns along the Mediterranean for palm, olive, and coconut oil, and still not gather enough. In Europe at this time, oil was used almost exclusively for cooking and for burning in lamps. For heating, people used wood, peat or coal. Vegetable oils were not produced in large enough quantities to be economical for heating.
One option was to set up their own merchant house in a city like Venice or Constantinople. If they offered a high enough price, word would get out and dealers would come from all over the region to sell to them. The problem with such a tactic was that it would tend to draw the attention of the very people whose notice they were attempting to escape. A lumber operation or mine could be operated in relative isolation, but an oil-buying enterprise could not. This was particularly true in the south of Europe, where the Dvergar could not count on political cover from Harald and Hrólfr. Every drop of oil would help, though, so most of Eirik’s ships were sent to the Mediterranean to buy—or, when necessary—steal oil. Recruiting and the procurement of all nonessential resources was put on hold. Ships were sent to Denmark, Norway, and along the coast of Normandy, Britain, and Portugal as well.
The primary source of oil for lamps in northern Europe at this time was a plant called false flax. The oil from false flax was a bit more expensive than the Mediterranean oils, but it could be bought in markets throughout most of Europe. Eirik’s ships would make port at Rouen, Nantes or Portsmouth and his men would travel overland for miles to buy all the lamp oil they could find. Even with most of Eirik’s fleet tied up for this purpose, though, they would not have enough to get through the winter.
Reyes pored over charts, diagrams and ledgers, hoping to find some solution. It was absurd and even pathetic, in a way: a space program doomed by a lack of vegetable oil. But there was no way around it: even if they could go back to coal, they’d have the same problem: coal could be purchased, but buying the quantity they would need in any one location—or even several locations—would draw too much attention. They could import firewood from Camp Glen, but even if the coal furnaces could be adapted to burn wood, they wouldn’t produce enough heat to make the buildings livable. In any case, all the firewood their two lumber operations could produce would be needed to heat the various satellite locations. The satellite facilities depended mostly on coal for heating, but many buildings at these locations still had wood-burning stoves or fireplaces that could be used to supplement the furnaces.
Ivar and his men, no longer needed for digging coal, were reassigned to a task Reyes at first thought quixotic: combing the countryside of Normandy for rapeseed plants. Rapeseed, a plant with bright yellow flowers that was prized for its oil-rich seeds, grew wild throughout much of Europe. The men were trained to locate and recognize the plant, equipped with scythes and wheelbarrows, and assigned to a knar, which would sail along the coast in search of easily accessible rapeseed fields. Often they would pay local farmers to transport the cut plants from the field to the coast in oxcarts. The plants would be laid out to dry and then loaded onto the karve to be transported to Höfn. The dried plants would be stored at Svartalfheim until the onset of winter made harvesting rapeseed impossible, at which time the men would be brought back to Iceland to spend the next several weeks stripping seeds from the plants. The seeds would be fed into a press to extract the oil, which would be mixed with the other oils that had been gathered to produce a consistent blend that be used to fuel the furnaces. Another two-dozen men were reassigned from Camp Lindberg, a titanium mine in Norway, as mining titanium was no longer a priority. Initially conceived partly as a make-work effort for the unemployed miners, the operation ended up producing nearly a quarter of the oil they needed to get through the winter.
From spring to the next fall, efforts to procure heating oil occupied most of Eirik’s manpower and ships, and about half of Pleiades’ manpower overall. Shipbuilding and other construction were largely halted. Some other work did go on, particularly in the area of weaponry. Gabe wanted to be prepared for a full-on attack in the event their presence in Iceland was discovered by some belligerent prince in Europe. Alma’s engineers continued to work on other technical problems, such as the development of vacuum tubes. This work too would likely grind to a halt when the cold made the poorly insulated wood framed dormitories and houses unlivable and people had to be moved en masse into Hell.
As the summer ended once again and the days began to shorten, Reyes became increasingly anxious. Even with all the oil that would be produced from the collected rapeseed plants, they had less than half of what they needed to get through the winter. Navigating the North Atlantic became increasingly treacherous in the winter, making it risky to attempt deliveries of oil beyond October. If November passed and O’Brien didn’t return with a shipment of oil, he was unlikely to attempt the voyage until the spring. By that time, if no other solution was found, hundreds at Svartalfheim would be dead of the cold.
The Committee met at the end of October to discuss emergency measures, but there remained only two options: evacuation and Gabe’s hail-Mary plan of sealing up the most valuable personnel in Hell. Evacuation would spell near-certain doom for the project, and it would require reassigning ships that were currently being used to deliver oil and dried rapeseed. Already they’d had to stop importing grain and other foodstuffs in the hopes that they had enough food stocked to survive the winter. As winter neared, the window for evacuation narrowed. The production of rapeseed oil went well, and the supplies of other oils continued to grow as karves arrived from the Mediterranean. The Committee determined that they had enough oil to heat most of the vital buildings for most of the winter. It seemed inevitable, though, that at least some would die.
Death was commonplace among the Norsemen, but it usually came suddenly, with no warning. Men died in raids or in shipwrecks, and women often died in childbirth. But they never had to prepare weeks in advance for some of their number to freeze to death. There simply wasn’t enough room for everyone in the buildings that would be heated. They had doubled up the previous winter, and this winter the floors would be completely covered with sleeping mats. A few could be taken in at Höfn, but some would have to volunteer—or be selected—to sleep in the unheated buildings.
In the end, there were more than enough volunteers. Many people, given the choice of spending the winter in a dimly lit, stifling cave with several hundred others, opted to take their chances aboveground. Reyes informed them this was likely a death sentence, but few were swayed. Her own house was newer and somewhat better insulated than most of the timber framed buildings, so she volunteered to stay there, opening it up to two other families, for a total of sixteen people. They had a fireplace for heat, and Sigurd had been stocking up wood scraps from his various projects, as well as driftwood and peat. The leftover vegetable matter from the rapeseed oil extraction process was divided amongst all the houses that would be occupied for the winter. Nothing that could be burned was wasted; one morning Reyes found Sigurd prioritizing the pieces of furniture he had laboriously built over the past fifteen years.
By the end of November, there was no longer any question of evacuation. Even if the ships could be spared, there was no place to go: the satellite locations were doubling up on sleeping accommodations as well, and there wasn’t enough food at these locations to go around in any case. Transporting people to more hospitable climes was also out of the question: if they moved one person to Granada or Italy, they would have to move hundreds, creating a huge security problem. It would only take one of them whispering to the wrong person about a secret Viking stronghold in Iceland to doom the entire project. In any case, sea ice and rough weather made travel to and from the European coast so treacherous in the winter that they were better off taking their chances in Iceland.
Fewer and fewer shipments of oil arrive
d each week. Most of the ships were half-empty, having embarked early in an attempt to beat the weather. A half-empty ship was worse than useless: the crew would have to be housed for the winter, and they would use more fuel than they carried. As December wore on, Reyes was forced to accept that O’Brien had failed. She had gambled on the conversion to oil, and she’d lost. As a result, work on Pleiades had halted and people were going to die. Leaving the mine running would have been a risk, but at least they’d have survived the winter.
On December 13, in the failing light of the afternoon, a knar was spotted approaching the harbor at Höfn. Word was sent to Reyes, who hurried to the shore. The sun had set by the time she arrived, and she stood on the dock next to the watchman, shivering in the cold wind, peering into the blackness. Several knars were still unaccounted for, but she hadn’t expected any more to arrive before spring. Ordinarily the ship crews were expected to be largely self-sufficient during the winter months, subsisting through a combination of trading, raiding and hunting. Assuming he wasn’t a fool, a coxswain wouldn’t risk the voyage to Iceland in December unless he had a full knar of important cargo. If this were Jorgunn or Armund arriving from the Mediterranean with a hold full of olive oil, it could mean the survival of several hundred people, and quite possibly that of Pleiades.
As she peered out at the rough waves, barely visible in the dim light of the stars, her comm crackled. “Not now, Gabe,” she snapped. Gabe, the only other person with a radio within a thousand miles, had been trying to get her to agree to attend a demonstration of some new weapon he was working on.
“Not exactly the welcome I was hoping for, chief,” said the voice over her comm.
Reyes’s heart jumped. “O’Brien?” she said, hardly believing it.
“Good to hear your voice, chief,” O’Brien said. “Fritjof says it’s too rough for a night approach, so we’re going to set anchor until sunrise. We’ve come too far to risk our cargo now.”
“Your cargo? You mean…?”
“Two hundred barrels of petroleum, chief. You know anybody who needs it?”
Chapter Thirty
The oil would get them through the winter. There would be no margin for comfort and no non-essential use, but everyone at Camp Yeager would survive the winter. The refinery was ready to go, and Alma’s engineers had it up and running the day after the barrels were unloaded. The vegetable oil would last until the end of January, at which point they would switch over to petroleum.
Because he had lost so many crew members, O’Brien had been able to leave only four men—Chegaoo, Dorian, Asger and Bjorn—behind to man Camp Hughes while he was gone. They wouldn’t have the manpower to produce any petroleum, but O’Brien was confident the offshore platform was safe from attack. It had taken his men nearly six months to build the platform, using essentially the design Dorian had outlined: a timber deck on a tripod made from three legs made by strapping eight pine logs together. They had stationed the platform about a half mile into the Gulf, where the water was about forty feet deep. The legs could be extended to sixty feet, putting the platform twenty feet above the level of the water. The legs were not attached to the sea floor, but rather rested on feet that were weighted down with rocks. Removing the rocks and jacking the buoyant platform down on the legs turned the platform into a barge that could be towed by a knar. Once the platform was in position, the platform was jacked up and the legs weighted again so that it stood firmly on the ocean floor.
The drilling rig was set up on the platform, and they drilled for oil as they had on land. In case of an Indian attack, the drill string could be pulled up onto the platform. The platform was essentially impervious to attack: a dozen men with rifles could lay on top of it and pick off men in canoes before they could get within bow range. It would take a force of hundreds to overwhelm them, and after their attack on the Makawaki, the Indians in the river valley were not anxious to try.
When they struck oil, the drill string was removed and stored, and the well was capped. More rocks were added to give the platform more stability. O’Brien designed a simple crane system to allow barrels to be loaded onto a pallet and lifted from the deck of a knar and back again. Because the ship could maneuver right under the crane, it was actually easier than transporting the oil from the well on land.
In March, three knars were sent from Höfn, carrying men and empty barrels. The knars would travel south and then west in the Caribbean, and finally north to Camp Hughes. Twenty of the men would remain at Camp Hughes to supplement the four O’Brien had left behind. These men—most of them little more than boys—were what passed for engineers at Camp Orville. Essentially they had the equivalent of a high school education with an emphasis on machine shop and some basic academic familiarity with oil wells. Dorian would remain as the chief engineer at Camp Hughes; O’Brien had no plans to return.
Once the well was producing again, the barrels would be filled, and the three ships would return to Höfn. One of the three would stop first at Camp Orville to let Aengus know the oil well was up and running. Orville and Wilbur would need to produce a lot more knars and barrels.
The first two knars returned to Höfn in June. They were unloaded and, after the crew had a few days to rest, sent back south with another load of empty barrels. The third knar, arriving three weeks later, got the same treatment. After that, knars were sent every two weeks or so, to ensure a steady supply of oil to be refined and stored at Svartalfheim. Fuel oil would be stockpiled for the winter while gasoline and diesel would be stored for use in vehicles and machinery. Kerosene would theoretically be stored for eventual use in jets or rockets, but they were so far from needing a large supply of kerosene that expending the resources to build additional tanks seemed like a waste. In all likelihood, most of the kerosene produced over the next few years would have to be burned.
The relative warmth and long days of summer were a relief to the residents of Svartalfheim, who had spent much of the past year underground or huddling together against the cold. People moved back into their houses and dormitories. Once enough fuel oil had been stockpiled to make it through the next winter, Reyes gave the okay to proceed on several projects that had been put on hold during the crisis. Construction on new buildings resumed, and the manufacture of many new diesel- and gasoline-powered machines began.
Gabe, working with Alma’s engineers, developed a smokeless propellant similar to cordite that he intended to use to replace the black powder used in the ammunition for the Winchesters and the other guns they’d produced. Gabe’s constant agitation for bigger, better guns with which to defend Svartalfheim was at odds with Reyes’s understanding of LOKI, which she summarized as: “any battle that required canons was already lost.” If explosive artillery had been used in a battle in tenth century Europe, history would have recorded it, which meant that it had not happened. At best, then, canons would be worthless; at worst, they would draw the attention of the Cho-ta’an or half a dozen power-hungry princes of Europe. Thus Gabe had focused his weapon-making efforts almost entirely on small arms. The need for a more powerful, smokeless propellant for these guns was one thing they agreed on.
The surfeit of kerosene and other petroleum products that could not be readily used sent Gabe in another direction of weapons development. With O’Brien’s help, he developed a substance similar to napalm from petroleum waste products and coconut oil. Gabe figured incendiary devices would be effective against a ship-based attack on their stronghold and would not be as conspicuously anachronistic as cannons: the Byzantines had used a weapon called “Greek fire” as early as the seventh century. While he and O’Brien developed incendiary bombs, Ibrahim ibn Muhammed built powerful counterweighted trebuchets that could launch the bombs as far as three hundred yards out to sea.
Work more directly related to Pleiades continued as well. In addition to the problem of amassing the physical resources and manpower to build the rocket, two major technical problems remained. The first, and most pressing, problem was the manufacture of
vacuum tubes, which would be needed for radio communications. They would also be needed for any sort of automated computers, but a computer using vacuum tubes would have to be the size of a small mountain—and use all the geothermal energy in Iceland—to match the processing power of the nanotech computers in the spacemen’s wrist cuffs. Transistors—to say nothing of semiconductors—lay far beyond the Dvergar’s capabilities. Any serious computation, such as calculating orbital vectors, would have to be done with their wrist cuffs.
By that summer, the year 907 A.D., Alma’s engineers had built some prototype vacuum tubes, but these failed too often to be used in any practical application. Initial tests of the amplification of the wrist cuff radio signals had shown promise, but to boost the signal strength enough to reach more than a few hundred miles required a lot of power and a lot of tubes, both of which factors increased the chances of failure. At this point, communicating by radio with Camp Orville in Nova Scotia, or even Camp Glen in Norway, remained out of the question. As with computation, the wrist cuffs remained the better solution. Reyes had suggested a spark transmitter system might work as a stopgap, but Alma was convinced she’d have reliable shortwave transmission working within a year, and redirecting resources to a spark system would only delay things.
Pleiades could limp along for a while—perhaps indefinitely—using only ship-based communication, but the ultimate success of their endeavor depended on the success of Alma’s efforts: orbital rendezvous was too complex for the crew of the capsule to manage alone. They would need real-time assistance from people on the ground., and the wrist cuffs were not powerful enough to communicate to each other from the surface to orbit. They’d only been able to talk to the crew of Andrea Luhman thanks to the ship’s powerful antennae. Without at least one powerful transmitter and receiving antenna on the ground, they’d never manage to rendezvous with the Cho-ta’an ship. Ideally, in fact, they’d have several ground transmitters, spread widely from east to west, to lengthen the window of contact between the ground and the crew of the capsule.
The Voyage of the Iron Dragon Page 21