There was no way to dock the Gemini capsule with the Cho-ta’an ship, so they would have to get the two ships close enough together that they could move from one to the other in spacesuits. The suits would be equipped with pressurized gas jets, allowing the astronauts to control their movement after exiting the capsule. They would only have enough propellant for a few minor course corrections; if the two ships were more than a hundred yards apart, their chances of successfully getting from the capsule to the Cho-ta’an ship were poor.
Nor would their problems be over once they got to the Cho-ta’an’s ship. To travel eighteen light-years, the astronauts would need a pressurized ship, and that meant repairing the damage to the hull. That’s where the engineer came in.
Cho-ta’an ships, like IDL vessels, were equipped with patches that could repair a hull breach up to several feet in diameter. These were carbon fiber panels that could be applied with adhesive to the interior of the hull to create an airtight seal. It was a simple concept, and the patches were similar to ones used on IDL ships, but none of the spacemen had ever actually used the Cho-ta’an variety. Fortunately, Reyes had had the foresight to download all the information the IDL had on Cho-ta’an ships, including a manual—written in the predominant Cho-ta’an language—retrieved from a derelict vessel that detailed the process for emergency hull repairs.
Candidates for the engineer position aboard Iron Dragon had to become fluent in the Cho-ta’an language and know that manual backwards and forwards. They also had to memorize everything that was known about the design of Cho-ta’an ships and their onboard systems. The Cho-ta’an ship was thought to be a small, corvette-class warship. As far as they knew, all Cho-ta’an military ships ran on the same operating system, and they knew the system hadn’t been locked when Mallick took control of the ship because he’d been able to use their communication system to transmit his message. Even so, they had to be prepared for the possibility that the operating system had been locked down or wasn’t functioning at all. The engineer would have to know how to bypass the computer and operate all the ship’s subsystems manually.
Then would come the hard part: once the Cho-ta’an ship was pressurized and functional, the two astronauts embark on the twenty-year voyage to the Fractalist planet, with no guarantee of success when they got there.
Despite these challenges, there was no shortage of volunteers for the astronaut program. Interpersonal dynamics were as important as technical skill and flying ability in determining who would be selected: A Cho-ta’an corvette’s interior was the size of a small house; even a couple who got along extremely well might end up killing each other under such circumstances. This was a psychological experiment that had never been conducted before, and it wasn’t like they had thousands of resumes to pore over. They were essentially arranging a marriage that needed to hold up under the most unfavorable conditions imaginable, and in the end all they could do was hope for the best.
In January of 933 A.D., the engineers completed construction of their first Titan rocket. The Gemini capsule, which would carry the astronauts into orbit, was not finished, but the rocket was launched on March four, 933, almost exactly fifty years after the crash of the lander. The payload was a dummy capsule consisting only of a basic propulsion system and various sensors connected to a recording system. Both stages of the rocket were lost in the Atlantic, as expected, but the test was successful. The reentry system had worked as designed and the dummy capsule was recovered at sea. The fully functional Gemini capsule was nearing completion, and construction was underway on another Titan rocket. This would be the first rocket to bear the name Iron Dragon.
The first manned launch occurred on April twenty-first, 935. Jorunn and David were picked to be the crew. As they had for every major launch prior, everyone on Antillia attended the launch, crowding against the chain link fence that surrounded the launch pad. The rocket launched on time, roaring off the launch pad and rapidly gaining altitude atop a pillar of fire. When it was just a dot in the sky, it began arcing to east to gain lateral velocity. First stage separation happened as planned, four minutes into the launch. After another four minutes, the second stage was jettisoned. The Gemini capsule, piloted by Jorunn, accelerated for another two minutes to achieve orbital velocity. The capsule nearly completed a full orbit and then began to fall back to Earth. This was planned: the goal of this mission was only to get a crew into space; no attempt to rendezvous with the Cho-ta’an ship would be attempted. To this extent, the mission was successful. The capsule was supposed to land in the ocean east of Antillia, where it would be retrieved by one of four floating crane platforms that be towed to the landing site by a karve equipped with a diesel engine. The platforms were spaced a hundred miles apart so that, assuming the capsule could be directed to fall within a five-hundred-mile strip of ocean east of Antillia, a crane would be within a hundred miles of the touchdown site. The platforms also served to extend the range of radio contact with the capsule. Two more ships equipped with transceivers had been sent to a bay on the eastern coast of Mexico and the coast of Mauritania, respectively, giving them Eidejelans radio coverage of nearly 3000 miles. Even so, they would still lose contact with the capsule for over an hour as it rounded the earth.
Cheers went up at the command center at Camp Aldrin when the ship in the Gulf of Mexico re-established contact with the capsule. As the capsule descended to Earth, though, the heat shield came loose, exposing the capsule’s base to temperatures over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for several minutes. Radio contact was lost again when the capsule entered the ionosphere, and it was never reestablished. The crew of the farthest platform reported seeing debris falling to the east, but nothing of the capsule was recovered. Jorunn and David were presumed dead.
The deaths of the two astronauts cast a pall over what was otherwise an astounding success. Nor was it the only bad news the Eidejelans would receive over the next year. That summer, after ailing for several weeks, Sigurd succumbed to pneumonia. He was eighty-nine years old.
Sigurd’s death, though not unexpected, was another blow to the unity of the Eidejelans. Sigurd had been the first Norseman the spacemen had befriended, and his marriage to Reyes had come to symbolize the union of the many different peoples who made up Pleiades. His death hit Reyes hard, although she did her best not to show it. Despite this, she and O’Brien, who were both now in their seventies, determined to see the project through. They had come too far to give up.
More bad news was on its way: it turned out that they had been overly optimistic in assuming that they’d left their enemies behind in Europe. In February of 936, they received a panicked transmission from Dorian at Camp Hughes, reporting that the oil platform was under attack by an army of natives armed with rifles. The transmission cut off abruptly, and Camp Hughes was never heard from again.
Chapter Forty-seven
The rifles were presumed to have been taken from Camp Orville, which meant that the Indians had made a two-thousand-mile journey from Nova Scotia to the Gulf of Mexico. It was unlikely they had done this on their own. Someone had organized them, and all signs pointed to the Cho-ta’an.
It seemed that least one of the aliens had survived and made it to North America. Maybe the Cho-ta’an had followed the Eidejelans there, or maybe they had voyaged across the sea with the same thought that had occurred to the engineers Reyes and O’Brien had feared would go rogue: in the absence of Popes and kings, one could—with the judicious application of technological knowledge—set oneself up as the lord of a new empire. Assuming that the Cho-ta’an had been behind the destruction of Orville and Wilbur, the aliens had been looking for them—and preparing for their meeting—for twenty-seven years.
No one at Camp Hughes had known the exact location of Antillia; it was one of the few closely guarded secrets that remained in the Pleiades project. Outside Camp Aldrin, only a few coxswains had been entrusted with the knowledge, and no ships had been scheduled to be docked at the platform at the time the attack occurred. This w
as not the only way for their enemies to find them, however.
The source of a shortwave transmission was difficult to pinpoint, but it was theoretically possible to find them through triangulation. The Cho-ta’an would have to have at least two shortwave receivers, over a hundred miles apart, though, which seemed unlikely. After Dorian’s transmission, Reyes, acting out of an abundance of caution, had the shortwave radio at Camp Aldrin moved to a karve, which would remain at least fifty miles east of Antillia when transmitting. Communications to and from the facilities in Bermuda, Jamaica and Trinidad would be kept to a minimum and relayed via handheld radios, which had a much more limited range and were therefore difficult to track from a distance.
There was a bigger worry, though: if the Cho-ta’an had been within a thousand miles of Antillia during the Titan II’s launch, they might very well have seen it. A rocket plume was a perfect beacon for pinpointing their location. The Eidejelans, assuming their enemies were across the Atlantic, hadn’t bothered with decoy launches. If the Cho-ta’an already knew their location, then the attack at Camp Hughes was a tactical strike, intended to weaken them, rather than an intelligence-seeking mission. Either way, the effect was the same: the attack had cut off their fuel supply, and now the Cho-ta’an’s army had likely acquired the forty rifles that had been shipped to Camp Hughes to defend it from the natives. Reyes and the rest of the Committee were in agreement: they had to assume the Cho-ta’an and their army intended to attack Antillia.
Presumably the Indians had attacked the oil platform with boats, but Dorian’s brief transmission gave no indication of what kind. If they were traveling by canoe, it would take them months to get from the Florida Panhandle to Antillia, if they could make the voyage at all. If the Cho-ta’an had stolen guns from Camp Orville, though, it was likely it had taken ships from Camp Wilbur as well. They may even have recruited—or captured—some of the Mi’kmaq who’d worked at Camp Orville in order to set up its own ship-making operation. Twenty-seven years was enough time to build a fleet.
The day after the attack, Michael flew along the coast of the Panhandle in the P-51 looking for ships, but he saw only a few canoes, the closest of which was many miles from Camp Hughes. He went as far west as Galveston Bay before turning back. The attackers appeared to have vanished along with whatever vessels they had used to attack the platform. The platform itself was gone, apparently burned down. Only charred stubs of the three massive supports remained, barely visible above the waves.
The next day, Michael took the P-51 out again. Still seeing no ships, he began flying back and forth over the river valley in ever-widening half-circles, hoping to spot some evidence of the Indian army. When he began to run low on fuel, he returned to Camp Aldrin. He went back the next day, but still saw no sign of the attacking army. The P-51 wasn’t exactly stealthy, of course; it could be heard from miles away. Even so, hundreds of men couldn’t just vanish. Someone had known the Eidejelans would investigate the attack by air and planned accordingly.
The only good news was that if the attackers intended to target Camp Aldrin next, they would at some point have to cross the water, and now that the Eidejelans were looking for them, it would be almost impossible for them to remain unseen. With Michael flying daily reconnaissance missions along the Florida coast, if anything larger than a canoe left Florida for the Caribbean, the Eidejelans would know about it days or even weeks before a ship could reach Antillia.
They had to assume, though, that the Cho-ta’an’s army was formidable, and that it would eventually come for them. It had already destroyed a facility they had thought impregnable, and after twenty-seven years of planning, the Cho-ta’an would not have revealed themselves unless they were confident of their ability to defeat the Eidejelans. The Cho-ta’an couldn’t know that the Eidejelans had left the bulk of their security force in Iceland, and that was worrying: if the Cho-ta’an’s army attacked, it would do so with the expectation that it would be facing several hundred well-armed fighting men.
In reality, with the exception of a few security officers, Camp Aldrin was virtually undefended. The Committee scheduled regular defense drills in case a Carib raiding party came to the island, but the Eidejelans were unprepared for a large-scale attack. They had no defensive walls or towers and few dedicated fighting men. The agile, fast-moving snekkjas had been disassembled for their lumber, and in any case, most of the men skilled with bows and melee weapons had been left behind at Svartalfheim. An engineer could be trained in a few hours to fire a rifle out a window with reasonable accuracy; attacking from a moving ship required another level of skill entirely.
The Eidejelans did have some advantages: Camp Aldrin was in about as good a defensive location as one could hope for: it was accessible only by water, and any attackers would have to come ashore and move over open ground for over a hundred yards before finding any substantial cover. Meanwhile, the defenders, armed with rifles, could fire from rooftops and windows, targeting the invaders at will. The Committee met to discuss its options, but it was unclear what they could do to prepare for an attack in however many weeks they had before the Cho-ta’an’s army arrived. Since a defensive wall would be worse than useless without towers to shoot from, O’Brien suggested building towers along the beach in areas where the Indians would be likely to come ashore. Reyes was not keen on the idea.
“We don’t even know who we’re going to be fighting,” she said, “or what kind of weaponry they have. For all we know, the Cho-ta’an taught them how to forge cannons.” It was convenient for the Eidejelans that Cho-ta’an was both singular and plural, as they had no idea if there was more than one left alive.
“The fact that we can’t prepare for everything does not necessitate that we engage in no preparations at all,” Alma said. “Defensive towers would seem advisable.”
“To what end?” Reyes asked. “Suppose we hold them off. Then what? We can’t survive a prolonged siege. We’re dependent on Camp Collins and the Caribs for food.”
“What’s the alternative, Chief?” O’Brien asked. “Surrender?”
“Business as usual,” Reyes said. “We go ahead with the next launch.”
For a moment, the members of the Committee were silent.
“We don’t know yet what went wrong with the last one,” Eckart said at last. Another test launch had been scheduled for the spring, but it had been postponed until the problems with the heat shield could be addressed.
“Nothing went wrong with the last launch,” Reyes said. “We had a problem with reentry. The crew doesn’t need to return to Earth if they rendezvous with the Cho-ta’an ship.”
“We don’t know if we’re capable of performing a rendezvous,” Nestor said. “We’d hoped to have a few more test missions.”
“Consider this your next test,” Reyes said.
Helena’s brow furrowed. “If something goes wrong, they’ll have no way to get home.”
“I understand that,” Reyes said. “But we may not get another chance. Our fuel supply has been cut off. We’ve got enough propellant for one more launch. Even if we survive this attack, it will take months to set up another well, to say nothing of preparing anything damaged during the attack. I can’t….” Her voice broke, and she took a moment to recover. “I’m not confident I can hold this project together for another year. We have to assume this is our last launch.”
“She’s right that recovery of the capsule is a luxury,” Alma said. “It’s not a requirement of the mission.”
“It’s a huge risk,” Eckart said.
“Is it?” Reyes asked. “The way I see it, the biggest risk is reentry. Eliminate that, and our odds of a successful mission go way up.”
O’Brien shook his head. “You’re talking about sending two people into space in an untested vehicle, with no way to get them back down. If anything goes wrong, they’ll die. They’ll asphyxiate, freeze to death, or burn up.”
“That’s right.”
“We can’t ask them to do that,” Helena said
.
“We can ask,” Reyes said. “I’m not going to force anyone to get in that capsule. This will be a volunteer mission.”
“Of course they’ll volunteer!” O’Brien snapped. “Because they trust us to know what we’re doing. We’ve sold them on this myth, this idea that we’re humanity’s last hope, and they believe us.”
“It’s not a myth, O’Brien,” Reyes said. “We were there, remember? We saw what happens. If we don’t do this, the Cho-ta’an win.”
“Even so,” O’Brien said, “it feels wrong to put this on them. They’re just children, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s what people do, O’Brien,” Reyes said. “Every generation hands off responsibility for the survival of the species to their children. They’re young, yes, but no younger than many of the other men and women we’ve pressed into service on this project. Many of them died as well, you may remember, in coal mine collapses or Viking raids or machinery accidents. Maybe I’ve grown hard in my old age, but after everything that’s happened, everything we’ve done, I’m ready to hand off a little of the weight to someone younger and stronger.”
The Voyage of the Iron Dragon Page 33