No. There was no smoke. Why was there no smoke? The sound was unmistakable, and the light…. No, the light was wrong, too. Not comfortingly chaotic, but precise and insistent. The light was a warning.
She slowly opened her eyes. It was dark except for the red light flashing above. The sensation of restraints pressing against her flesh penetrated her awareness. No fire, and yet the crackling persisted.
Moving her right arm, she felt unexpected resistance, as if she were submerged in liquid. She looked down, but her eyes refused to focus on anything. Where was she?
The lander, she remembered. She was on a planet. Earth? No. Ridiculous. Shelve that thought for now. They had been flying over trees. Who was ‘they’? Slater. Slater was the pilot. Why couldn’t she see anything? And that goddamned crackling!
Foam, she thought. The crash foam had deployed. Which meant the lander had crashed. Upon impact, jets lining the walls had sprayed liquid into the cabin. The liquid reacted with the atmosphere, expanding and creating bubbles. Within a fraction of a second, the foam had completely filled the cabin and hardened to the consistency of soft rubber. A few seconds later, the foam had begun to dissipate, contracting and drying into discrete, pea-sized pellets. That was the crackling she heard. The visor of her helmet was still down, but the gel-packed eye shield had retracted.
Soon the level of the foam receded until it was below her knees. She saw now that a tall man sat in the seat in front of her. Gabe something. Next to Gabe was Slater, the pilot. Reyes turned to her left. Sandy-haired man, skinny. Something Irish. O’Hare. No, O’Brien. All three were unconscious.
The four of them had been selected for a mission. They had been picked to land on Earth and….
She stopped again. Land on Earth?
Earth was dead, destroyed by the Cho-ta’an. And yet, when she closed her eyes, she saw the fjords slipping underneath them.
The man in front of her stirred.
“Gabe?” she asked. “You okay?”
Gabe grunted. “Feel like I got hit in the head with a sledgehammer, but otherwise, yeah. You?”
“I think so. The foam….”
“The foam probably saved our lives. We must have rolled twenty times.”
“Rolled…” Reyes repeated.
“End over end. You sure you’re all right?” Gabe said, releasing his restraints and turning to look at her. “You know where you are?” He unstrapped his helmet and pulled it off, letting it fall to the floor.
“Earth?” Reyes suggested.
“Right-o. You know what year it is?”
“Twenty-two… no, wait. That’s a trick question.”
“Indeed it is,” Gabe said, moving toward Slater’s chair. His feet crunched in the dry pellets of foam. He leaned over Slater and touched the side of her face. “Hey, Slater,” he said quietly. “You okay?” She didn’t respond. Gabe unstrapped her helmet and gingerly removed it. A crack ran along the top of the helmet where the overhead support had buckled. He dropped the damaged helmet to the floor.
“Shit,” Reyes said.
“I don’t think it’s too bad,” Gabe said. “Maybe a concussion. Helmet took the worst of it.” He pulled open one of Slater’s eyelids with his thumb. “No retinal damage. Can you check on O’Brien?”
Reyes nodded, and then regretted it. A sharp pain had set in right behind her eyes. Excessive gee force would do that. If it weren’t for the eye shields keeping her eyeballs from stretching beyond their limits, she’d likely be blind. She gritted her teeth and fumbled with her restraints. “Yeah, I’ll take a look.”
Gabe pulled a retractable blade from his belt and began working on Slater’s restraints. Reyes got up from her seat, immediately stumbling in the foam and falling with a crunch at O’Brien’s feet.
“Smooth,” O’Brien murmured. Looking up, she saw him smiling at her. Dark circles had already begun to appear around his eyes, from blood vessels that had burst during the crash.
“A little… disoriented,” Reyes said.
“Traveling thirteen hundred years back in time and then taking a ride in a blender will do that,” O’Brien said.
Reyes leaned back against the cushion of foam. “So that really did happen? We’re on Earth during the Middle Ages?”
“Only one way to find out,” O’Brien said, moving to detach his restraints. He let out a scream and for a moment his body went limp. His eyes rolled back in his head.
“O’Brien!” Reyes said, moving toward him. “What’s wrong?”
O’Brien’s eyes flickered open, and a weak smile played at his lips. “Think I… broke something.” His face had gone pale.
“Okay, try not to move. You done with that knife, Gabe?”
“Yeah, here.” Gabe carefully handed her the knife. She cut through O’Brien’s restraints and then handed the knife back to Gabe. O’Brien winced as she pulled off his helmet. “You hit your head?”
“No,” O’Brien said. “I mean, yeah, probably. But it’s my left side that’s bothering me. May have broken a rib or two.”
“Would you be more comfortable lying down?”
Gabe winced again. “I’d be more comfortable with about six shots of whisky.”
“It hurts when you’re not moving?”
“Is breathing a kind of moving?”
Reyes sighed, turning to Gabe. “What do we do?”
“Why are you asking me?” Gabe said, still examining Slater. “You’re in charge of the doomsday bomb time travel spaceship repair team.”
“You’re the medic and our tactical expert,” Reyes growled. “Now stop screwing around and help me figure out what to do.” She’d gotten used to Gabe’s teasing, but this wasn’t the time. She was still addled from the crash, and she didn’t need Gabe undermining her authority to make a point.
Gabe nodded. “Grab the medkit from the back. Get some smelling salts and see if you can get Slater conscious. I’m going to check out O’Brien.”
Reyes went into the back and pulled out the white plastic case with the medical supplies. She grabbed a handful of smelling salt packets, shoved them into a pocket and then worked her way forward in the cabin, trading places with Gabe. Sitting down in the seat next to Slater, she cracked open one of the packets under her nose. Slater didn’t stir.
“Jesus!” O’Brien screamed from behind them. Reyes glanced back to see Gabe with his hand under O’Brien’s shirt.
Gabe turned to face her, shaking his head. “Three cracked ribs,” he said. “Probably some internal bleeding, but hopefully that will stop on its own. If it doesn’t….” He trailed off. “Hopefully it stops on its own,” he said again.
Reyes cracked open another capsule and waved it under Slater’s nose. “Slater,” she said, loudly and firmly, “wake up.” But Slater still didn’t stir.
“This is bad,” Reyes said, as much to herself as to Gabe. “This is very bad.”
“Take these,” Gabe said, putting a couple of pain pills in O’Brien’s hand. O’Brien put the pills in his mouth and then sucked down some water from a packet Gabe was holding. Gabe handed him the packet and the pill container. “Hold on to these,” he said. “Take them as you need them.” O’Brien nodded.
“Half our crew is injured,” Gabe said, turning to Reyes. “We can attend to their medical needs, but moving them is going to be just about impossible. The area we crashed looked pretty deserted, but anybody within twenty klicks must have seen us go down. Or heard it, at least. I’d guess we’ve got at most two hours before the natives start showing up.”
But Reyes wasn’t thinking about the wounded, or even their tactical situation. She was thinking about the mission. The reason they had come to Earth. Casting a new manifold was going to be difficult enough, but repairing the lander? Slater had barely been able to keep it in the air even before the crash. Even if it was reparable, it could take years to get it airborne again. And that assumed they’d have a safe place to work, undisturbed—which brought her back to Gabe’s point.
“
The locals,” she said. “They’ll be armed with what, swords? We’ve got pistols and there’s a portable railgun in the back. We can hold them off.”
Gabe laughed. “For how long? A day? A week? Even if our whole crew were conscious and in fighting shape, we’d have to sleep eventually. Don’t get me wrong, there are worse ways to go out than holding off a Viking horde with a railgun, but it’s not a long-term strategy.”
Reyes cracked open another capsule under Slater’s nose, and finally she began to stir. Slater moaned quietly and her eyes flickered open.
“Hey, Slater,” Reyes said. “Welcome back. How do you feel?”
Slater gave a weak smile and raised her hand in a thumbs-up.
“Good,” Reyes said. “It’s only fair that you have to live through the aftermath of that shitty landing with the rest of us.”
Slater smiled again. “Tired,” she said.
“You may have a concussion. Try to stay awake.”
O’Brien groaned.
“Help me get O’Brien out of his chair,” Gabe said. “Might help to get some pressure off those ribs.”
“Coming,” Reyes said. “Stay awake, Slater. Use these if you have to.” She handed Slater the rest of the capsules and then climbed into the back to help Gabe.
While O’Brien whimpered and moaned, they dragged him as carefully as they could to the rear of the lander. Reyes removed the cushions from his chair to create a makeshift bed. They laid him down on his back and covered him up to his shoulders with a blanket.
“Is that better?” Reyes asked.
“It’s… not worse,” O’Brien said, wincing.
“I’ll give you a local to take the edge off,” Gabe said. “Better to keep you conscious for now. We’re going to have visitors soon.” O’Brien winced again as Gabe touched the infuser to his side. Then he seemed to relax a little. Gabe put the infuser back in the kit and turned to Reyes. “Okay, chief,” he said. “What’s the plan?”
“You’re our historian. What kind of people are we going to encounter here?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it?” Gabe said. “Vikings. Norsemen, if you prefer.”
“So guys with swords and horns on their hats?”
“The horns thing is a myth. Unlikely they’ll have swords, as the Vikings didn’t have the technology to forge steel. Probably spears and axes. That’s good news and bad news, of course. The steel of the lander’s hull is superior to anything on this continent. It’s priceless, if we can hold on to it.”
Reyes nodded. “Any guess as to how many we should expect?”
Gabe shrugged. “You saw the landscape. It’s pretty rugged. Sparsely populated, no major population centers. Scandinavia lagged behind the rest of Europe in political centralization, which could work in our favor. There aren’t any big standing armies or security forces here. The Vikings were mostly opportunistic raiders.”
“So…?”
“Our first encounter? Could be one, could be a hundred. But within the next day or two we’re going to be getting a lot of visitors. So what’s the plan?”
“Get the weapons,” Reyes said. “We protect the lander at all cost.”
Chapter Thirteen
Gunnar Bjornson stood on his skis at the head of the group, peering into the woods across the river. No one spoke for some time. Even the birds had been temporarily shocked into silence.
“Was it a skystone?” asked the man behind him at last. This was Leif, the dark-haired young warrior who had joined their party ten days ago in Trondheim. There they had met with Håkon Grjotgardsson, the jarl who administered Trondelag for Harald. Håkon had reaffirmed his loyalty to Harald and loaned Leif to them, insisting that he knew the terrain as well as any man alive. Leif was competent enough, but he was young and over-eager.
Gunnar shook his head. “You saw that thing. Its lines were like a ship’s.”
“A sky ship?” asked Leif asked dubiously, standing next to Gunnar. The other men waited dutifully behind. “Do even the gods possess such things?”
“I don’t know,” Gunnar said. “But I intend to find out. It looked like that thing hit the ground only a few miles north of here. The trees are sparse here, so we should have no trouble finding it.”
“Is that wise, Gunnar?” Leif asked. “I understood we were expected at Svelvig tonight. The king himself will be arriving soon.”
“I’m aware of our instructions, Leif,” Gunnar said irritably. “Do you think Harald was aware a ship made of metal would be falling from the sky when he gave them?”
“Certainly not, sir. But we don’t know for certain it was a sky ship.”
“Whatever it is, I think we can assume Harald will grant us some leeway under the circumstances. Even if it is only a skystone, it’s worth looking into. I heard of a skystone falling in Denmark that was made of pure iron. Enough to make twenty swords. Do you think Harald would forgive us a day’s tardiness for twenty swords?”
“I should think so, sir.”
“Then we head northeast, over the bridge. Figure on another day of travel.”
“Yes, sir,” the men murmured together. Gunnar steered his mount to the right. Leif and the others followed.
The bridge across the river was less than a mile ahead. The men removed their skies to cross and and then followed a narrow hunting trail that led through the woods. It was nearly midday when the group emerged from the woods into a clearing and started walking across the plain. Soon they began to see signs of impact.
“Look at that,” Leif said, pointing at a gash in the ground that had been cleared of snow and the top several inches of soil. It was perhaps four yards wide and ten yards long. A great mound of snow and earth lay at the far end of the gash. Beyond this, the ground was unbroken for perhaps a hundred yards. Then there was another gash, somewhat shorter and more irregular in shape.
“Gunnar,” said the man behind Leif, whose name was Thorvald. Thorvald was a mountain of a man, a hand taller than the others. He rarely spoke.
Gunnar turned to look where Thorvald was pointing. A dark gray object lay in the snow a stone’s throw away. Gunnar walked toward the object. The others followed.
“What is it?” Leif asked, as the others approached.
Gunnar bent down to pick the thing up. It was a piece of flat material, perfectly rectangular, about the length of his arm and half as wide, and as thick as his forefinger. He lifted it easily. The weight and flexibility reminded him of birch bark.
“A shield?” Thorvald suggested.
“No place to hold onto it,” Gunnar said. “I think it’s part of the sky ship.” He tried to tear the material and failed. “It’s strong, and looks to be waterproof. Would be good building material. If you could shape it, it would make a nice saddle.” He bent the panel as far as he could, but it sprang back to its former shape as soon as he let it go. Gunnar shrugged. “Here, Leif, you hold it.”
Leif scowled but took the thing without complaint, tucking it under his arm. Gunnar knew he shouldn’t antagonize the young man, but he couldn’t help himself. They were ill-equipped to haul cargo; Leif would simply have to carry it.
They continued to the next gash in the ground. Before they reached it, they could see another gash after it, and another after that. The distance between the gashes grew gradually shorter as they went.
“It hit like a flat stone striking the surface of water,” Ivar said. “It tumbled end over end, many times.” Ivar was the youngest member of the group.
Gunnar nodded. He pointed at a gray thing sticking out of the snow to his right. “There’s another one. Leif, go get it.” The fifth member of the group, a man named Steinar, allowed himself a chuckle at Leif’s expense.
Leif wordlessly walked to the flat panel jutting out of the snow and picked it up. He tucked it next to the one already under his arm. By the time he had returned to the group, Gunnar had pointed out another.
Leif sighed. “Sir,” he said, “there’s a limit to how many of these things I can carry.�
�
“Perhaps,” Gunnar replied disinterestedly, “but we haven’t reached it yet.” As he finished speaking, he pointed to another panel in the distance. Leif hung his head but went after the thing. He was carrying six of the gray panels by the time they spotted the silvery object in the distance.
“Amazing,” Gunnar said. “It seems to be mostly intact. Follow me.”
As they got nearer to the fallen object, Gunnar was more certain than ever that it was some sort of craft, fabricated by human—or human-like—hands. It was even shaped roughly like a ship, with a long middle and two tapered ends, although it was somewhat larger than even the biggest long ships. The main difference was the wings and tailfins, which made it look a little like a gigantic silver starling. The wings weren’t quite right, though. They seemed to be fixed in place and were too small, proportionally speaking. Even if it were possible for a bird of this size to fly, it would need much larger wings to stay airborne. It was no surprise that such a craft would plunge from the sky; Gunnar could hardly imagine it getting aloft in the first place. Gunnar and his men were approaching from the rear left of the craft. He drew his sword, and the others followed, their weapons at the ready.
Gunnar reached the tail of the craft and stopped, listening. All was quiet. He motioned for Ivar and Thorvald to go around the left side while he, Leif and Steinar took the right. Gunnar crept along the side of the craft, unsure what he was looking for. Assuming he was correct about it being a ship, it had to have a door somewhere. Where would they put it? On top? In the stern? The metal exterior of the craft was incredibly smooth and uniform. Whoever fashioned it knew more about metallurgy than even the famed Frankish blacksmiths. Gunnar was not one for fanciful stories, but he began to wonder whether it was perhaps dwarves or giants who had built the craft. Might the door be enchanted somehow, making it impossible for a mere human to see?
The Dream of the Iron Dragon Page 13