The Dream of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  “I think we can do better than that,” Carpenter said. “Give me a few days and I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  *****

  While Carpenter used twenty-third century technology to spy on King Harald, work continued on several other fronts. Some men worked on finishing the main hall and barracks, and others had begun digging a defensive trench a few meters on the outside of the perimeter fence. The dirt from the trench was piled up to make a rampart a little farther down the hill. While Sigurd and Gabe supervised the construction of defenses, Reyes and O’Brien began to work on another engineering problem: manufacturing guns.

  When Harald attacked, his forces would likely outnumber them by ten to one or more. The defenses would slow them down, but to beat the attackers back, the defenders would need some serious weaponry. They briefly discussed trying to manufacture ammunition for their pistols, but decided it was unfeasible. They just didn’t have the tools to engineer bullets with that sort of precision. In any case, only five of them had pistols: Reyes, Gabe, Gunnar, Agnar and Brynjarr. O’Brien had never bothered to get his gun back from Brynjarr, as the latter was a much better shot.

  Building simple guns from scratch was a better bet, especially since they’d already perfected the process of making black powder. Thanks to the recent Viking raids, they had plenty of metalworking tools and scrap iron. What they lacked was a forge.

  O’Brien and Reyes enlisted several strong men to transport heavy stones from the riverbed. They stacked these to form an oven with an opening above it where the heat would be channeled. Charcoal would have to suffice for a fuel source, as there was no source of coal in the area. By using the bellows from the signaling apparatus, they were able to get the forge up to fifteen hundred degrees Celsius—the melting point of iron. They tested the forge by fabricating a knife blade and several spearheads, which were hardened by reheating and then submerging them in cold water. These turned out well enough, but the Norsemen disapproved of the end result. A man with some blacksmithing experience, named Arvid, showed them how to make the blades tougher through a process of pattern-welding: the blade was made by forge-welding several layers of iron together and then twisting and manipulating them to form a pattern.

  Once they’d gotten the process down, they hoped to increase their rate of production. Unfortunately, they found that the narrow base of the forge didn’t allow for enough charcoal to keep the temperature above fifteen hundred for more than a few minutes, and it couldn’t be loaded with more charcoal without interrupting whatever work was being done on the forge. Reyes was ready to tear it apart and start over, but O’Brien suggested starting from scratch with a better design and adapting the old forge into an oven for baking bread. They had no trouble purchasing large quantities of wheat from farmers farther upriver, and some of the men had already rigged up a crude millstone. So far, though, they had been eating the wheat ground up into porridge, as they had no oven. Shortly after they began construction on the new forge, Carpenter transmitted his report on the status of Harald’s forces.

  The good news was that Harald was busy suppressing a rebellion in the south of the country, and that it would probably take him at least until fall to get things under control. The bad news was that when he’d secured control of the southern part of the country, Harald would have unquestioned dominion over all of Norway—and a sizable military force that could then be directed toward other ends. The Norsemen avoided sailing in winter, for good reason, but when spring came Harald would probably have little difficulty dispatching twenty or more ships to deal with the spacemen.

  It was vital, then, that the fort had not only good defenses, but weapons capable of turning back such an attack. The new forge was plenty hot, and could be refueled from the rear, so work would not be interrupted by refueling. O’Brien’s ribs were nearly healed; these days he could swing a hammer almost as well as Reyes.

  Their first attempt at forming a gun barrel took them nearly a week. They began by melting down scraps of iron and then flattening the semi-liquid iron blob into an oblong rectangular sheet. They rolled the sheet into a pipe and forge-welded it along the seam, with a metal rod down the middle to prevent the pipe from collapsing on itself. Finally, the inside of the barrel was bored out. The end result was a barrel suitable for a musket or breech-loaded rifle. They had briefly considered trying to build a cannon, but ultimately rejected the idea. A cannon would require a lot more iron and labor, and would probably be overkill: what they needed were a lot of guns that could be fired quickly.

  They settled on a simple breach-loaded design: one end of the barrel was closed off by a metal stopper on a hinge, so ammunition could be loaded without dropping bullets down the barrel. To reduce reload times, they’d also have to manufacture self-contained cartridges containing lead bullets and a black powder charge. A trigger mechanism would be added to detonate the charge, and a wooden stock could be added later to make the gun easier to hold. Rather than attempting to rifle the barrel to improve accuracy, they decided to make long, flechette-like bullets that would be self-stabilizing. Accuracy wasn’t a big concern in any case; they expected to be fighting at relatively close range for the most part, and there would likely be so many attackers that it would be hard to miss them.

  It took them until October to develop a working prototype. It was loud, unreliable, inaccurate and dangerous. Several Norsemen beat each other bloody vying to be the first one to use it.

  Meanwhile, Carpenter had had no luck in locating the Cho-ta’an vessel. Either it had been broken into pieces by the sea, it was too far down to register on Andrea Luhman’s sensors, or Carpenter was looking in the wrong place. He had already widened his search parameters several times, with no luck. It was beginning to look like recovering the Cho-ta’an ship was not going to happen. The good news, though, was that Mallick had agreed to keep Andrea Luhman in orbit until spring, to continue gathering intelligence on Harald’s forces. The captain had evidently decided that if they were going to miss the end of the war by two hundred years anyway, a few more months probably wouldn’t make a difference. When Harald’s attack finally came, they would have plenty of warning.

  In between the various projects, raiding continued throughout the summer, providing both luxury items the Norsemen could sell and items that Reyes or O’Brien had requested for their tasks. The raids garnered more than material goods, though. In the spring, when it wasn’t clear they were going to be able to pay their debt to Hrólfr, Reyes had had to promise to relax her “no women” rule for the men who promised to stay through the winter. Sigurd had been pressuring her on this, telling her it was unrealistic to expect the men to go for months with no female companionship. If nothing else, he said, she should do it for her own safety. She thanked him for his concern and patted the pistol on her hip.

  Finally, though, she had to relent. She still insisted that no women be brought to the fort against their will, but she had no illusions about how difficult it was going to be to enforce that rule. In the last raid, several men brought young women—some as young as sixteen—back with them, but it was impossible to determine how willing they were. They were certainly scared, but no more so than any girl who had traveled far from her home for the first time. They spoke only a dialect of Frankish, which none of the spacemen could understand. Some of the Norsemen knew a few words, but they weren’t eager to interpret. In any case, Reyes had limited options for dealing with the situation. She couldn’t very well send the girls home. In the end, she had Gabe take each of the girls aside and explain as best he could they could come to him if they felt like they were in danger. None of them ever did.

  Reyes also had Sigurd explain to the men that the women were to be considered full members of the community, not property. Surprisingly, there were few objections to this. She had noticed at Haavaldsrud that the Norsemen treated their women well and didn’t seem to keep slaves. That may simply have been because the economics of life in the valley didn’t favor slavery, but the fact was th
at they seemed to be used to treating each other—including women—as equals.

  One woman in particular, named Inga, seemed determined to make the most of her situation. She took over cooking duties from the young Norseman who had been performing them thus far with middling results. Reyes had shown Inga how to use the oven, and she immediately delegated the task of bread-making to two younger girls, who were soon producing so much fresh bread that men had to be sent upriver to buy more grain. The settlement was already consuming a considerable amount for the beer-making operation that the men had just begun.

  Inga put two other girls in charge of making jams and preserves from the plums, redcurrants, cranberries, gooseberries, cherries, and various other berries men had bought from farmers or picked from bushes in the surrounding countryside. As a result of the efforts of Inga and the other girls, the quality of the food—and thereby the morale—in the camp improved immensely. No one complained when the women were given their own private quarters in the newly constructed lodge, ostensibly as a reward for their hard work. In reality, Reyes wanted to make sure the women had a place to go where men were not allowed. Several of them had been claimed by particular men and others made a habit of switching tents with some frequency. Whether money changed hands in any of these transaction Reyes couldn’t say, and she didn’t ask. Nor did she plan to intervene if one of them got pregnant. These people would just have to deal with that eventuality however they ordinarily did under such circumstances.

  Disease was a bigger concern, but it turned out not to be the venereal sort that posed the greatest threat: in mid-December, a flu-like illness swept through the camp, affecting nearly every Norseman to one extent or other. The only ones unaffected were the spacemen, probably thanks to the adaptive antibiotic nanobots they’d been injected with prior to boarding the lander. The plague took nearly three weeks to pass, leaving three men dead.

  Raiding had ceased in the fall, and the men occupied themselves with shoring up the fort’s defenses, including building a couple of casemates overlooking the river, and making weapons. They made several dozen spears and hundreds of arrows, using the forge when Reyes and O’Brien didn’t need it. If the spacemen failed at making guns, at least they wouldn’t run out of arrows.

  Over the next several weeks, however, they perfected their gun-making process. By February, they had twenty completed rifles, including triggers, grips and stocks, and four hundred bullets. O’Brien trained Agnar and Brynjarr in the use of the weapons, and later the two selected twenty men to form their rifle corps. They trained far to the west of the fort, where the gunshots wouldn’t be heard.

  The raiding had gone so well that nearly all the men opted to stay for the winter. Both Ísbátr and Bylgjasverð remained in Normandy for the winter, although a few men did return to Norway on other ships embarking from the area. They took with them a sizable share of the spoils, most of which was owed to Dag for the use of his ships. Most of the rest was distributed to the families of the men who remained in Normandy.

  By the end of February, Harald had suppressed the rebellions in the south, and Carpenter reported that warships were amassing near Harald’s palace at Avaldsnes. Hrólfr had visited in the fall to let them know that he had been informed of their history with Harald. He didn’t seem angry, but he informed them in no uncertain terms that he would not sacrifice his own men to protect them from Harald. Reyes ended up sending a cartload of furs and silver to him to ensure his neutrality.

  On March 28, a little over a year after the lander crashed, Carpenter reported that a fleet of twenty-eight ships had set out across the North Sea. They were headed for Normandy.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The ships arrived at the mouth of the Rouen on the tenth of April. A sentry posted on a ridge overlooking the beach spotted them in the morning and ran back to tell the others. By the time he arrived, Andrea Luhman had come over the horizon and Carpenter had already reported that the fleet was heading up the river.

  There was plenty of room along the riverbank for twenty-eight ships, but there was only one path through the woods to the fort, which meant that if Harald’s men didn’t want to hack through the underbrush with their axes, they had to congregate on the bank and then advance single-file up the hill. That made them easy targets for the archers manning the two casemates a hundred meters or so from the river. The casemates were only large enough for three men each, but they managed to take out twelve of Harald’s men before they even reached the path.

  The casemates were difficult to access from the shore; a tunnel connected them to the fort. There were heavy iron portcullises at both ends that could be slammed shut with the pull of a chain, making an assault from the tunnel virtually impossible. When the men on the shore began hacking through the woods toward the casemates, the archers fled through the tunnels, slamming the portcullises behind them.

  Gabe watched from the watchtower as Harald’s men surged up the trail. Carpenter had estimated the total number at just over a thousand. The fort’s occupants, including the women, currently numbered seventy-five. They were outnumbered fifteen to one.

  That proportion dropped slightly as the lead man stumbled across a tripwire, triggering a black powder charge hidden in the bushes that showered the column of men with iron fragments. Another dozen men fell to the ground, dead or wounded. The corpses and wounded men were dragged out of the way and the assault continued. Undaunted, Harald’s men poured out of the woods and began moving in both directions around the fort to encircle it. Archers standing on scaffolds inside the perimeter fence rained arrows down on them, to little effect. Occasionally a man would fall, but the attackers’ shields absorbed most of the arrows. Gabe didn’t worry until he began to see men carrying wooden ladders up the trail. The ladders appeared to be about five meters long: just long enough to span a forty-five degree angle to the top of the perimeter fence. Someone had definitely been feeding intelligence to Harald.

  “You there, Carpenter?” Gabe said into his comm. Andrea Luhman was about to slip below the horizon again.

  “I’m here, Gabe.”

  “Would have been nice to know about the ladders.”

  “Is that what those are? They must have blended in with the decks of the ships.”

  “Some mystical sky god you are,” Gabe said. “See if we sacrifice any more goats to you.”

  “Sorry, Gabe, you’re breaking up. Something about goats?”

  “Forget it, Carpenter. See you on the flip side.”

  “How many ladders?” asked O’Brien, who was waiting below with the rifle corps. Not wanting to risk losing any of the riflemen, Gabe had instructed them to stay out of sight until he had a better understanding of the threat. Reyes was with Gabe in the tower, watching the enemy assemble. All three spacemen were wearing their flight suits; these days they generally wore more conventional clothing, saving the flight suits for times when they needed added protection, either from cold or from potential enemy attack.

  “Looks like about twenty,” Gabe said.

  “Any other surprises?”

  Peering at a group of men near the trail that seemed to be coordinating the attack, Gabe realized he recognized one of them. A chill ran down his spine. It didn’t bode well for the defenders that the man leading the attack on them was literally invincible. Gabe glanced at Reyes. She had seen him too. But Reyes had given Slater’s comm to Sigurd, so if he said anything about Harald on the open channel, Sigurd would hear it. That could only lead to trouble, as Sigurd might take unnecessary risks to get to Harald.

  “No more surprises,” Gabe said. “Our priority at this point is keeping those ladders down. If they start getting men over the fence, we’re dead. We don’t have the numbers to fight a pitched battle.”

  “Understood.”

  “I’ve got seven ladders to the east, four to the west, six to the north and three to the south. Position the gunmen accordingly.” Narrow scaffolds lined the inside of the perimeter fence, about a meter and a half from the
spikes at the top, allowing gunners and archers to fire outside without exposing much of themselves to the enemy.

  “Copy that.”

  Gabe watched as O’Brien ordered the gunmen to their various positions. The spacemen had become reasonably conversant in the Norsemen’s language over the winter, and Gabe had made certain that they could communicate basic tactical information without any trouble.

  The attack began in earnest before the riflemen had even taken their positions. A volley of arrows rained down on the defenders while small teams of men advanced with the ladders, climbing the rampart. Few of the attackers’ arrows hit their target, and the defending archers riddled the ladder men with arrows. The men fell, leaving their ladders where they had fallen. Most of the ladder men hadn’t even reached the top of the rampart.

  But the attackers regrouped, and as another volley of arrows rained down, more men advanced, running to the ladders. They held their shields up as they ran, making it difficult to hit them until they reached the ladders and had to put their shield aside to heft the ladder. These men too fell, riddled with arrows. The cycle repeated several more times, the attackers dying shortly after they picked up the ladder. But with each group, the ladders advanced a few meters.

  The situation changed dramatically once the riflemen were in place. Gunshots rang out in the air, striking fear into the attackers. The faster riflemen could fire six shots a minute, and the wooden shields were no protection against iron bullets traveling two hundred meters per second. Half the ladder men now fell before they even reached the ladders.

  It didn’t take long for the attackers to realize, though, that there were a limited number of riflemen. They began to send twice as many men to each ladder, hoping to overwhelm the defenders with sheer numbers. Unfortunately for them, the rifles weren’t the only guns the defenders had.