Major Sadona rubbed his chin, his eyes darting around anxiously as if he expected to find a more senior officer to tell him what to do. Sadona had been a captain before being put in charge of the Janthus station; the promotion had been intended as partial compensation for such a godawful assignment.
“All right,” he said, seeming to make up his mind. “We’ll send the probe to Toronus. Let those jackasses at Supreme Command worry about it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Darius. “Only….”
“What is it, Corporal?”
“It’s just… how do we know Toronus hasn’t been destroyed too?”
The Major opened his mouth as if to berate Darius, then slowly closed it. “My God,” he said. “You’re right, Aquiba.” Darius watched as the implications of what they had seen sank into Major Sadona’s brain: they had no reason to think Tabor was the first world to suffer the effects of the Izarians’ new weapon. In all likelihood, they had struck several other, more strategically important, planets. For all Darius knew, the few planets near Janthus Observation Station were all that were left of the Concordat. “But then… there’s no one to tell.”
“Well, sir, we don’t know Toronus is gone.”
“It’s gone, Aquiba. It’s all gone. They probably started at Toronus and then destroyed Levitus and Barzilai, then worked their way across the Ilian Cluster. We’re all that’s left. This damn station and five planets. Hell, maybe less than that. It’s been three days since the probe last reported on Helon. Maybe they started there and moved on to Tabor. If they’ve got enough of those bombs, or whatever they are, they could annihilate every planet in this sector within a few weeks.”
Darius could see that the Major was on the verge of panic. He did not handle crises well; a week earlier he had nearly had a breakdown over a pea-sized meteorite that had torn a small hole in one of the storage lockers, rendering part of the station unusable while the hole was repaired. The current problem was many orders of magnitude more grave, and Darius thought the Major might shut down altogether.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” Darius said, anxious to reassure Sadona.
“No, no,” the Major said, getting to his feet. “This is it, Aquiba. The end of it all. That damned probe is all we have, and it’s worse than useless at this point. Why warn people about a cataclysm they can’t do anything about? Hell, I wish I didn’t know. In fact, I think I’m going to go to my quarters and drink until I don’t remember any of this. And if, God forbid, I wake up tomorrow, I’m going to do it again. Send the probe to Toronus if you want to. Send it into the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Send it a thousand light years into deep space. I don’t care.” He left the room, letting the door slide shut behind him.
Once again alone at his station, Darius wondered if it was true. Was the little group of planets clustered around Janthus the last refuge of humanity? If it were true, then the Major was right: there was nothing any of them could do. The CDF was finished. Unless the rumors of inhabited fringe planets were true, humanity itself would be exterminated.
No, he thought. The CDF still had one warship left, two hundred light years away. Could the probe survive a two hundred light year voyage through hyperspace? Even if it did, would the crew of Varinga be able to make any use of the information? Weren’t they as impotent as the rest of humanity?
On the other hand, there was nothing to lose by trying to contact them. It was the longest of long shots, but maybe Varinga could still do something about the Izarians. Using the Major’s password (“majorsadona”), which he had guessed a week earlier while trying to edit his personnel record, he retrieved the last known coordinates and trajectory of Varinga. The data was five weeks old, but as long as Varinga hadn’t made a hyperspace jump since the last probe contact, he could guess their current location with reasonable accuracy. He typed up a brief message and ran the batch of commands that would prepare the probe to reenter hyperspace.
Chapter Eight
E ric Bloodaxe stood on the deck of the longship Skjótrmarr, half in a daze from exhaustion. The ship groaned and pitched beneath him, and the wind tore at his clothes and threw sheets of rain at him. The storm had raged since before dusk, and now the night was half gone. A flash of lightning revealed a bucket full of water before him. Eric bent to take hold of it and then turned to hand it to Gulbrand, standing next to him, who would empty it over the gunwale, but the bucket slipped from Eric’s cold-numbed fingers and fell to the deck. Eric caught a glimpse of it rolling away from him before the lightning faded, leaving them in darkness. He growled a curse, but his voice was lost in the thunder. He moved to fetch it, but his fatigued muscles betrayed him. Gulbrand caught him with an outstretched arm that was as steady as an oak bough.
“You need to rest!” Gulbrand shouted in his ear. Eric knew it was true, but he refused to cower huddled against the gunwale while his ship was in danger of being swamped.
“It’s no use!” cried Bjorn from the hold below. “She’s filling up too fast. The ship is lost!” As lightning flickered in the distance, Eric saw that Bjorn was now standing halfway up the ladder. Even so, the water was up to his knees. Bjorn, a stocky man with pale blond hair, was nearly as tall as Eric. They had started out with six men bailing—two in the hold, two to lift the buckets to the deck, and two to empty them—but with water filling half the hold, they were down to three. The others huddled together on the deck, clutching the gunwales or the mast, trying to stay warm and avoid being thrown overboard. For hours they had labored to keep the ship pointed into the swells, but most of the oars had been lost, and it had become clear that trying to control the ship’s heading was futile.
As the hold filled with water, the ship sank deeper into the sea, and the waves rose higher over her gunwales, hurling torrents of water that sloshed about until it found its way below. With each flash of lightning, the water level in the hold crept higher. Soon Bjorn would be forced to join them on the deck as they awaited the wave that would pull Skjótrmarr into the depths. There they would join the crew of the other longship, Starkmarr, helmed by Eric’s brother Ragnald, which had disappeared in the swells several hours earlier. No doubt Starkmarr had capsized; it was a miracle Skjótrmarr had remained aright this long.
Another flash of lightning revealed movement: Haeric was coming toward them, holding the bucket.
“No, Haeric!” Eric shouted, as blackness came over them, but thunder stole his voice. Haeric had acquitted himself well on their voyage so far, but he had spent most of his life on land. He did not have the intuitive feel for the sea that came from spending years aboard a ship, and so he did not know what was about to happen.
A moment of eerie calm followed as the ship reached the top of the swell, and then she groaned as she pitched violently in the opposite direction. Eric lurched forward, fighting the waist-high torrent of water, but Gulbrand’s powerful hand gripped his arm, holding him back. The next flash of lightning revealed no sign of his son.
“Haeric!” Eric cried, as the ship began to right itself again. He leaned over the gunwale, staring into the blackness. He could see nothing but the distant flicker of storm-seized clouds and the occasional glimmer of the gigantic swells beneath, rising as if striving to meet the sky. Somewhere out there, amidst the chaos and endless darkness, his eldest and favorite son, fought to keep his head above water. “Haeric!” Eric cried again, but he knew Haeric could not hear him; his voice barely reached the stern of the little ship. Eric had the sense that the gods were playing with him. So this is how it ends, he thought. Fate will not be denied. I was meant to die at Stainmore, and now the gods will make me pay for disrupting their plans. The Christian god, he knew, was supposed to be merciful. He recalled a priest telling him the story of Jonah, who was thrown overboard to appease the gods. Yet Eric had lost his own son, and the storm raged unabated. There was to be no mercy for Eric Bloodaxe, it seemed.
The numbness had gotten to his feet and seemed to be working its way up his legs. He welcomed
it; soon he would feel nothing at all. The bucket was lost, the oars were lost, the sails were torn and useless. All of mankind’s tools were of no avail against the gods. He would die here at sea, an unknown and ignoble death. Neither heroic enough to be called to Valhalla nor virtuous enough to enter the Christian heaven, he supposed his spirit would skulk here on the desolate sea until Ragnarök, a barely discernable wisp of greasy smoke drifting at the mercy of the wind. And a thousand years from now, if some unlucky ship were to pass by, its crew would shudder and murmur imprecations as faint, anguished cries of “Haeric!” reached their ears.
As he strained to catch a glimpse of his son, a glow in the nearby clouds illuminated the sea before him. The glow grew steadily brighter, and soon it became apparent that it was not lightning. Eric’s attention, though, remained fixed on the sea. There! Something riding up the side of one of the swells. It had to be a man. Haeric? He shouted his son’s name again, but again his cries were lost in the wind. The swell rolled toward Skjótrmarr, and the man was lost behind it.
It was now almost as light as day. Eric looked up to see the clouds pierced by a blinding white light, as if the full moon herself were descending toward the sea in front of him. Over the distant rumble of thunder, Eric heard cries of terror from his men, still huddled in the prow. Gulbrand stood open-mouthed next to him, staring as the light continued to grow brighter. Putting his hand in front of his eyes, Eric could just make out the contours of a sleek, saucer-shaped craft, perhaps half the size of the longship. Hanging from it was a rope, at the end of which was a man-sized object shaped like an inverted teardrop. Eric watched in awe as the craft hung in the air, suspended just above the level of the swells as if by an invisible hand, oblivious to the buffeting winds and rain.
Eric held his breath as the teardrop thing disappeared behind the swells. When it appeared again, rising toward the ship, he let out a shout of terror. The thing had opened up like an octopus and now held a man clutched in its tentacles. It was Haeric, seized like a dead rabbit, his arms and legs hanging limply. A moment later, he disappeared into the craft. The craft then moved toward Skjótrmarr until it hovered directly overhead. Eric could now make out a hatch in the thing’s belly, from which the rope was now descending, the menacing creature hanging from it. Eric stepped back, wishing his sword were handy; he could not fight the creature, but perhaps he could cut the rope. He would not be devoured by that monstrous creature if there were any alternative. Better to dive into the sea and swim down until he blacked out.
“Remain still!” called an impossibly loud voice from above. A woman’s voice? “The extraction device will not hurt you!”
“Freya?” Eric said, frozen in astonishment.
“The crew of the other ship is already aboard Varinga,” the woman’s voice said. “Stay where you are, and we will get you all to safety.”
Anger arose in Eric’s breast. What right did this woman have to keep interfering with his fate? Had she not already told him he would die in obscurity? And if my son is dead, he thought, then it is better that I too meet my end here.
Perhaps, though, Haeric was not dead. If anyone could save him, it was the people on the sky ship. He had seen them work miracles with burns and broken limbs. Reviving a drowned man was probably not beyond their abilities. Could he die here not knowing whether his son lived?
He sighed in resignation. Once again, his fate had been wrested from his hands. He shuddered but did not fight as the octopus thing spread its tentacles and wrapped itself around him, leaving his face free so he could breathe. The tentacles were soft and spongy, applying just enough pressure to hold onto him.
“Eric!” Gulbrand shouted as he lifted off the deck. He grabbed hold of one of Eric’s ankles, but the thing’s ascent did not slow.
“One at a time!” shouted the voice. “We’ll get you next!”
“It’s all right, Gulbrand!” Eric said. “It’s only our Valkyrie, come to cheat death once again.”
Chapter Nine
“I
f you expect gratitude,” said Eric, “then you shall wait until Ragnarök, and then some. If you had not intervened at Stainmore, we would not have faced our deaths in that storm.” He sat at a conference table with Freya and Commander Dornen.
“If Freya had not intervened at Stainmore,” Dornen said, “you would all be dead.”
“An honorable death in battle.”
“If all you want is to die with a sword in your hand, that can be arranged.”
“All right, that’s enough,” said Freya. Since bringing the Norsemen aboard Varinga again, she had become resigned to her role as mediator. She didn’t feel that she was very good at it, but there simply wasn’t anyone else to do the job. “None of us asked for this. We’re people from three different cultures, fighting three different enemies. But I choose to believe there’s a reason we’re in this room together.”
“As I understand things,” said Eric, “the reason is that while Commander Dornen and his men fled like scared rabbits, his enemy decided to finish the war.”
Dornen struggled to hold his temper. “We have one warship left. I made a tactical decision to keep it out of the Izarians’ reach while we secured a reliable ground fighting force with which to oppose them.”
“The fact is,” Freya interjected before Eric could respond, “Commander Dornen made his decision based on the best information available to him. CDF intelligence suggested that the Izarians were at least two years from developing a so-called planet-killer device. As Eric points out, however, we have learned this is incorrect. The transmission from the Janthus probe suggests that not only have the Izarians developed the planet-killer; they have used it on at least one world. Given Tabor’s lack of strategic importance and remote location, it is unlikely that it was the first world to be targeted. Strategic analysis suggests an eighty percent chance that most if not all of the major Concordat planets have already been targeted.”
“Genocide,” said Dornen. The word was rendered in Norse as “mass slaughter” by the translator. “Our spouses, children, friends… all dead. Billions of people. By now, there may only be a few million people left, scattered across a handful of worlds. And assuming the Izarians don’t run out of bombs or develop a conscience in the next ten days, we are looking at the extermination of all mankind. And while that may not matter to you, Eric, I will remind you that includes your own world, Earth.”
Eric shrugged. “If Ragnarök comes, I will be ready.”
“It’s not going to be Ragnarök, you knuckle-dragging barbarian!” Dornen snapped. “There isn’t going to be any glorious battle at the end of time, and there sure as hell isn’t going to be any magical rebirth of the species. When they drop one of these things on your planet, everything just dies. A wave of destruction sweeps over the planet and the molecular bonds that hold everything together—plants, animals, people, ships, buildings—let go, just for an instant. Just long enough to kill anything that lives and turn everything else into sludge and dust. If you think you’re going to stand against that tide with a wooden shield and an iron sword, you’re far stupider than I imagined.”
Eric grinned. “It is too bad that your people die in such an ignoble manner. Mine will not. Freya herself has told me that she knows Earth’s future, and I believe her. How can Earth have a future if it is destroyed by this ‘planet-killer’?”
Dornen’s face had gone red. He looked like he was on the verge of either storming out or launching himself across the table at Eric. Freya didn’t blame him, but she didn’t see either option turning out well.
“Eric,” she said, “this is not helping. For one thing, while it is true I have spoken with those who have seen the future, I would rather not risk the entire world on a bet that the future cannot be changed. Second, even if Earth is not directly threatened at the moment, if Dornen’s people fail to defeat the Izarians, we will have to face them sooner or later ourselves. And finally, in case you’ve forgotten, we need Dornen’s help against the C
ho-ta’an. All of this depends on you and your men, it is true. But an army that is unreliable or disloyal is worse than nothing. On this ship, Commander Dornen is in charge, and if you intend to make an issue of that, you should say so now, while we are still in orbit. If you cause problems once we are underway, Dornen will have you thrown out the airlock, and I will not protest. You will find death by vacuum to be much swifter and surer than drowning.”
Eric shrugged, trying to appear unconcerned, but it was clear to Freya that her speech had had an effect. “I do not contest Commander Dornen’s authority on this ship.”
Dornen opened his mouth to speak, but Freya was quicker. “He is also in charge of this mission,” she said. “As long as the fight against the Izarians goes on, you will follow orders.”
Eric waved his hand in front of him irritably. “Very well.”
“Good,” said Freya. “Then we’re in agreement. Commander Dornen, you have your army.”
“I intend no offense to Eric and his men,” Dornen said, still tense and obviously choosing his words carefully, “but what I have is not an army, but a single platoon of only fifty men.”
“Each of my men is worth—”
Freya held up her hand, and Eric grunted, folding his arms before him.
“Yes, I’m sure each of your men is worth twenty or fifty or a hundred Celts or Saxons or whoever it is that you’ve been fighting on Earth,” Dornen said. “But you fought against mere men, armed with swords and axes. You have had less than twenty days’ training with the mech suits, and the enemies you face will be far deadlier than any man.”
“I have seen your fliers, and your walkers, and your tanks. We beat them all.” There was some truth to this: the Vikings had acquitted themselves well in head-to-head combat, although their overall metrics were poor.
The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5) Page 8
