The Dream of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  So disconcerted was he by this possibility that Gunnar did not at first notice the man sitting with his back against the craft, looking right at him with a bemused smile on his face. Gunnar stopped and gripped his sword tightly in front of him.

  The man spoke something that sounded like a greeting, but Gunnar could not understand him. Other than his drab, tightly fitting clothing, the man did not look in any way unusual. He did not look like a Norseman, but could easily pass for a Frank or Saxon. Gunnar noticed that the man was sitting on a sort of box that had been propped against the craft as a seat. In his hands, the man held a finely molded piece of metal. The main body was shaped like an oblong box; the man was holding it by a handle the protruded from the bottom. The man lifted the object before him, as if making sure that Gunnar saw it. He spoke again, in the same strange tongue. His tone was firm but not impolite. It occurred to Gunnar that the thing might be a weapon. It certainly didn’t look intimidating.

  “Who are you?” Gunnar said, hoping that the man might speak the Norsemen’s tongue in addition to his own.

  The man shook his head and said something else that Gunnar could not interpret. Something about this man was very strange, something Gunnar could not quite put his finger on. No, the problem was not that he was strange; it was that he was too familiar. This was no dwarf or giant, but merely a man. The language was clearly not Nordic, and Gunnar knew enough German to eliminate that possibility, but the words did sound vaguely Germanic.

  “It sounds a little like English,” Leif said.

  “You speak English?”

  “Some. I occasionally translate for foreigners who visit my jarl.” Leif was still carrying the gray panels he had picked out of the snow.

  “Put those down, you fool,” Gunnar snapped.

  Leif dropped the panels.

  Gunnar saw Ivar peeking around the front of the craft. Gunnar held up his hand and Ivar halted where he was. Thorvald stopped just behind Ivar. The stranger glanced in Ivar’s direction, but he didn’t seem concerned at the prospect of being surrounded by armed men. Gunnar wondered if the stranger knew something he didn’t. Were there more men hidden somewhere? There was nothing but undisturbed snow all around them. If there had been others in the craft, they were still inside.

  The stranger continued to stare back at him with a slightly bemused look on his face. Gunnar wondered whether the man’s calm demeanor was a bluff. Given the exotic nature of the craft, it was not inconceivable that he was protected by some powerful magic, but Gunnar tended to favor simpler explanations: the stranger was hiding his fear to unsettle Gunnar and his men.

  Gunnar turned to Leif. “Ask this man who he is and where he came from.”

  Leif nodded. “I will try.” He thought for a moment, and then spoke a few halting words.

  The stranger regarded Leif curiously, as if he were a dog walking on his hind legs. After a moment, the stranger said something back to him. Leif frowned.

  “It isn’t English,” Leif said, “but it’s similar. It might be Friesian, or some dialect of Saxon.”

  “Can you talk to him or not?”

  Leif spoke another series of halting words to the stranger. The stranger responded, speaking very slowly. He gestured toward the sky. He said a few more words, patting his chest with his fingertips.

  “He says…” Leif started. “That is, I think he is saying that he comes from a place very far away. He calls himself Gabe.”

  “Good,” Gunnar said. “Tell him my name. And ask him what this thing is.” He gestured to the craft. “Ask him where he was going, and why it fell to the ground.”

  Another slow, halting exchange followed.

  “He calls it a ‘sky ship,’” Leif said. “His people are at war. Their ship was damaged in a fight. A battle.”

  “Then there are other ships like this one?”

  Gabe seemed to understand what he was asking. He replied, and Leif translated. “He says there are others, but they are very far away. I think he means to say that they are not a threat to us.”

  “What about the enemy who damaged his ship? Could they not have followed?”

  Leif and Gabe engaged in another halting exchange.

  “The enemy ship fell into the sea. His ship is the only one in this area.”

  “Are there others inside the craft?”

  Leif pointed at the craft and spoke several more words.

  Gabe shook his head.

  “He is alone?” Gunnar said.

  “He claims to be,” Leif said. “Or he doesn’t want to answer the question. I can’t be sure which.”

  “There are others inside,” Gunnar said. “Count on that. Ask him what he intends to do now.”

  Leif spoke again, and Gabe replied, motioning at the panels at Leif’s feet.

  “He says he wants to… add these pieces to his ship?” Leif said uncertainly.

  Gabe shook his head and spoke again. He gestured at other pieces of the ship that had fallen to the snow around them.

  “Repair,” Gunnar said. “He wants to repair his ship. Ask him how long it will take.”

  Leif spoke again, and Gabe laughed. He said something and then pointed at the sun.

  “A long time he, said. He spoke the word for moon.”

  “Months,” Gunnar said. “Maybe years. Tell him this land belongs to King Harald. If he wishes to stay here to repair his ship, he will have to request an audience with Harald directly.”

  Leif translated as best he could. Gabe shook his head.

  “What’s that?” Gunnar said. “He’s refusing to ask for permission?”

  Leif spoke again, and Gabe replied curtly. He patted his weapon as he did so. Leif did not need to translate.

  “I tire of this,” Gunnar said. “Tell him he has no choice. This land and everything on it is the property of King Harald. He can come with us to plead his case before the king or he can die.”

  Leif translated as best he could. Gabe seemed to understand, but he merely shrugged and patted his weapon again.

  “Kill him, Ivar,” Gunnar said.

  Ivar took a step forward, brandishing his sword in front of him. The stranger calmly stood up, holding his weapon before him. A loud bang sounded, like an iron hammer hitting granite, and a tuft of snow exploded between Ivar’s feet. Ivar gave a yelp took a step back. The others stared at Gabe in shock.

  Gabe said something and patted the weapon again.

  “What is that thing?” Ivar said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “He can’t kill all of us,” Gunnar said, keeping his tone pleasant to disguise the content. “On my mark, we all attack at once. Ready? Now.”

  The four of them lunged forward. Gunnar’s foot came down on a patch of packed snow and slipped, causing him to fall to his knees. As he fell, a deafening boom filled his ears. Steinar, to his right, howled and fell backwards. Another thunderclap and Thorvald dropped his sword and fell forward, clutching his belly. With the third boom, Ivar shrieked and slumped to the ground. The foreigner now had his weapon pointed at Leif, who’d barely had time to draw his hunting knife. It was over before Gunnar could get to his feet. He backed away and sheathed his sword.

  The stranger, still composed, said something Gunnar couldn’t understand. Gunnar turned to Ivar, who was lying on the ground to his left, softly whimpering. Blood spread rapidly across the snow underneath him. To Gunnar’s right, Thorvald and Steinar appeared to be already dead.

  “You son of a whore,” Gunnar hissed. “You don’t know what you’ve just started.” He backed slowly away from Gabe several more steps. Ivar, lying on his back, reached for him and tried to speak. Blood poured from his mouth, and he began to cough uncontrollably. The young man would be dead soon. Gunnar turned and walked away, ignoring Ivar’s gasps for breath. Behind him, the stranger’s weapon boomed again and Ivar was silent.

  “What—what do we do?” Leif asked, walking behind Gunnar.

  “Continue to Svelvig,” Gunnar said. “If these people
want a fight, we will give it to them.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Are they gone?” asked Reyes’s voice in Gabe’s ear. She was still inside the lander. Gabe had left his comm channel open so she could listen in.

  “For now,” Gabe said quietly.

  “You let some of them go.”

  “You expected me to hunt them down and execute them?”

  “They’ll be back in larger numbers.”

  “More will be coming either way. If they think we can’t be reasoned with, they have nothing to lose.”

  “Understood. Thanks, Gabe. Let’s hope we’ve at least bought some time.”

  “How are your patients?”

  “O’Brien’s sleeping. Slater’s got a killer headache but seems okay otherwise.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Gabe said. His head hadn’t stopped pounding since the crash, and firing several shots from his pistol hadn’t helped any. He sighed and wondered if he should do something about the three corpses lying in the snow in front of him. He decided against it, as he was the only line of defense between these barbarians and the lander. He couldn’t afford the distraction. At least the cold air would keep them from rotting for a while.

  Notwithstanding his pounding head and the three dead Vikings at his feet, Gabe felt good. The lander was probably irreparably damaged, and they were all eventually going to be killed by psychopaths with spears, but he was rather enjoying the fresh air and the view of the mountains. The air was cold on his face and hands, but—thanks to the temperature-regulating flight suit—he was comfortable. The sky was a deep blue and the sun was had just passed its zenith in the southern sky. Earth, he thought. They had made it to Earth. And not the burned-out husk of a planet that remained after the Cho-ta’an bombardment, but the Earth of the old vids and stories. If Reyes wanted to kid herself that they were still getting off this planet, that was her choice. Gabe intended to enjoy what time he had left.

  He got to his feet, stretching and filling his lungs with the crisp, clean air. Following the path in the snow he’d made before Harald’s men showed up, he made a wide circuit around the lander. Tactically speaking, the lander’s position wasn’t bad. There was nothing around them but snow in every direction for several hundred meters. On three sides, the plain was hemmed in by forest; to the west were mountains. The snow provided plenty of warning; he had heard Harald’s men coming a hundred meters off.

  King Harald, Gabe thought. That would be Harald Fairhair, although he probably wasn’t known by that name yet. The lander’s data banks contained terabytes of information, including thousands of Earth history books, but everything was still offline. Reyes had been working on getting the systems back online since the crash, but without any success. Her priority, though, was to get the external cameras working and maybe rig some kind of alarm system that would allow them to get some sleep. So far the lander remained essentially an inert hunk of metal.

  Having completed his circuit of the lander, Gabe sat down again on the storage crate he’d been using as a chair. He stared at the wispy clouds veiling the mountains and wracked his brain for details about Harald Fairhair. Gabe knew quite a bit more about Earth history than the average person, but most of his knowledge of Harald could have been gleaned from his conversation with Gunnar’s men: Harald was a Viking chieftain who, through a series of conquests, became the first king of Norway. As Gabe recalled, he was succeeded by his two sons, Eric Bloodaxe and Hakon the Good. More than that, he couldn’t say. So much for his knowledge of history giving him an advantage in dealing with the natives. The average ten-year-old probably knew more about politics in the region than he did.

  Gabe had never had much use for politics anyway. In his mind, there wasn’t much difference between the Human Colonization Consortium carving up worlds for their political cronies and Vikings dividing the spoils of battle. Humanity hadn’t really changed in thirteen hundred years; the only real difference was the scale of conquest. For a short while between the American Revolution and the colonization of space, there had been reason to hope that ideals had triumphed over tribalism, but that delusion had evaporated upon contact with the Cho-ta’an. For the past eighty years, most of humanity had lived under a de facto military dictatorship—a mostly benevolent dictatorship, to be sure, but a dictatorship nonetheless. The Interstellar Defense League was the only political power that mattered, and it was no more democratic than its parent organization, the HCC. When Earth was destroyed, democracy went with it.

  It turned out that for all its virtues, Western Civilization was too fragile to be transplanted. Western ideals survived in some attenuated form, like vines clinging to a stone wall, hoping for an errant ray of sunlight, but all the great Western democracies had died. Some, like the Republic of Germany, existed as quasi-feudal mockeries of their former selves; others, like the United States, collapsed into a thousand competing factions. China and Japan lived on as nation-states, having come to understandings with the HCC that allowed them to create ethnically homogenous zones on several newly colonized planets. Several quasi-sovereign groups of Muslims also survived, the largest of which, the Interstellar Islamic Caliphate, was spread across seven worlds. New Jerusalem, constructed in orbit around Geneva, housed some three hundred thousand people of Jewish descent; it was the largest structure ever built by humans.

  For all their differences, though, all these groups—the IIC, the Chinese, the Jewish state, as well as all the big interstellar corporations—were members of the Interstellar Defense League. The IDL’s power was not absolute, and its members often fought among themselves, but the ever-present threat of the Cho-ta’an meant that the IDL always held the trump card. All other interests were secondary to preventing humanity’s destruction. For the most part, the IDL played this card judiciously, but members of the Security Council were not above using the threat of Cho-ta’an attack to indulge their own grievances.

  Having been born into such a universe, Gabe never felt like he had any other choice but to fight. He signed up for the IDL’s Surface Attack Force, commonly known as the Space Marines, on his eighteenth birthday, and spent most of the next ten years on extremely dangerous assignments dreamed up by someone in the IDL brass who may or may not have been motivated by a desire to save the human race. Even when the motives of the operation were pure, the odds were fifty-fifty that the person who had dreamed it up was a paper-pusher who had no understanding of conditions on the ground, and on the off-chance the operation’s architect was both competent and of pure motive, he still didn’t give a rat’s ass whether Gabe lived or died. Marines were expendable, by definition.

  There was less political bullshit in the Exploratory Division, but it had its own problems. If he were perfectly honest, the whole division seemed like a waste of resources to him: the Cho-ta’an were never going to stop hunting them, no matter how far they ran. Any ship that was off looking for habitable planets was a ship that wasn’t directly involved in the effort to push back the Cho-ta’an. But that too was a decision that had been made far over Gabe’s head. He’d done his part for the war effort; it was time for something different. Andrea Luhman was his first assignment in ED. And whatever else could be said for his current predicament, it certainly was different.

  Reyes cursed in his ear.

  Gabe tapped Reyes’s icon on his cuff. “What’s up, Chief?”

  “Everything is fried. I may never get the electronics back online.”

  “Can we get power at least? We’re going to need life support soon.”

  “We’ve got a charge in the batteries, but they’ll run down quickly if I can’t get the reactor back online.”

  “Any chance of that?”

  “Sure, but without the regulating software running, the safety override will shut it down after ten minutes. Then it’ll be locked down for six hours. Hard to generate much power that way.”

  “I guess I don’t want to know what happens if you disable the override?”

  “Meltdown,” Reyes
replied. “The heat alone would be enough to vaporize the lander. But that’s not the worst of it. We’re carrying about twenty thousand liters of liquid hydrogen, and another ten thousand of oxygen. If the reactor melts down, we’re looking at an explosion the size of a tactical nuke.”

  Gabe nodded. He knew the basic principle of how the reactor worked. Supposedly the reactor recreated conditions that occurred naturally only at the edges of a black hole in order to stimulate proton emission. The reactor could be used to bring about nuclear fission for power generation, but it also served another purpose: the lander’s relatively small fuel tanks didn’t carry enough fuel for it to break free from the gravity of a planet the size of Earth, requiring the lander to literally create its fuel as it went. On a planet like Earth, the lander could simply suck water vapor out of the air and split it into hydrogen and oxygen, but on many planets there wasn’t enough water or free hydrogen for that. In such cases, the lander could take in another gas—carbon dioxide or methane, for example—and transmute its atoms into hydrogen and oxygen. After launch, it would skim the top of the atmosphere until its fuel tanks were full and then use the stored fuel to break orbit. Thanks to the proton reactor, the lander could take off from virtually any planet, given at least a trace atmosphere.

  “All right,” Gabe said. “No reactor. We conserve power. That means no heat. What about the portable transmitter?”

  “It works, but we won’t have line-of-sight again with Andrea Luhman until tomorrow morning. By then, they’ll be out of range. And will be for the next six weeks.”

  “Copy that,” Gabe said. He had figured as much. He wondered how much longer Reyes could sustain this delusion that they were still getting off Earth. To Gabe it had been clear since those first railgun shells hit the lander that they were going to be stuck here. But then, he hadn’t bought the theory that they had traveled back in time thirteen hundred years either, and here they were.

  He hoped Reyes came around soon. The sooner she accepted the fact that they weren’t getting off Earth, the sooner they’d be able to get started on the business of survival. Their knowledge of history might not help them much, but their knowledge of science and technology certainly could—to say nothing of their possession of the most valuable artifact on the planet. In raw materials alone, the lander was worth a fortune. The trick was going to be holding onto it—or at least getting something in return for giving it up.