The Dream of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 1)

by Robert Kroese

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Reyes wanted to shout, “We’re here!” but she knew it was pointless. Her comm would transmit at most a hundred klicks. If Andrea Luhman were in orbit, she’d be at least two thousand kilometers away. Still, she had to tell someone. She crawled out of her tent and walked to Gabe’s. In her ear, Carpenter continued, “Reyes? Gabe? Anybody there?” There was a long pause. Reyes reached into Gabe’s tent and shook him awake.

  “Reyes?” he asked blearily. “What the—”

  He stopped when he heard Carpenter’s voice. Reyes had switched to her external speaker.

  “We spotted the lander,” Carpenter was saying. “Well, what’s left of it. Jesus, what did you guys do? I saw the lander before we lost contact. It looked fine. I was convinced you guys were going to walk away from it. Couldn’t raise you on the comm, but… Okay, well, look. Mallick thinks you’re dead. He thinks the tanks must have leaked and a short ignited the fuel. My thinking is that if the tanks had ruptured, the lander would have blown up a lot sooner. So my guess is you got away. Some of you, anyway. But, even if you did, without the lander, your mission is DOA. I have an idea for how you might still be able to get off planet, but, well, the captain thinks it’s crazy. He thinks we should cut our losses and head back to IDL space, although I’m not sure what good it’ll do. Temporal dilation will slow down the aging a bit, but there’s no way we’ll survive the journey. We’re just going to have to program Andrea Luhman to show up two hundred years after the war ends and hope someone is still around to use the bomb.”

  Reyes raised an eyebrow at Gabe. There was another long pause before Carpenter continued.

  “Anyway, we’re going to stick around for a few days. I’m guessing your transmitter was destroyed with the lander, which is why you’re not answering. Or you’re dead. But if you’re dead, there’s no point in me talking to you, so let’s forget that possibility. Yeah, so, it looks like we’re going to hang around for a few days to see if we can make contact with you. If there’s any chance of… I don’t know. Your suit transmitters probably won’t work. Maybe a signal fire? We’re scanning all of Norway and Denmark, so if you make a big enough fire, we’ll see it. We’re in low Earth orbit, just passing over the Atlantic on the way toward you now. I mean, assuming you’re still somewhere in Europe. Orbital period is one hundred nineteen minutes, so we’ll be directly over Norway soon. I’ll transmit again shortly.”

  “We’ve got to send the signal,” Reyes said.

  “All right,” Gabe replied, getting out of his tent. “Let’s go.”

  They woke O’Brien and went to the partially constructed shed where they’d stored the magnesium powder and the other supplies they needed.

  “Should we warn them?” O’Brien asked, motioning toward the tents on the ground around them.

  “Nah,” Gabe said. “If they wake up, they wake up.”

  “Hopefully they don’t panic and impale us with spears,” O’Brien said.

  Most of the Norsemen were currently gone on a raiding expedition, and those who remained had seen Reyes and O’Brien conducting tests with the magnesium powder. What they would think of the spacemen setting off fireworks in the middle of the night was anyone’s guess, but the Norsemen were used to the foreigners doing things that seemed to make no sense.

  Improving on O’Brien’s idea of connected patches of magnesium, Reyes had built an ingenious contraption for consistently producing flashes of maximum luminosity at regular intervals. It was essentially a tripod with a wooden box on top. Connected to one side of the box was a bellows constructed of two wood panels and deer leather. On the other side of the box was an opening with a door on a spring. Compressing the bellows moved air through the box, forcing the door open and dispersing the magnesium in a cloud of dust. As the hinged door opened, a piece of flint struck against steel, creating a spark and igniting the cloud. The result was an incredibly bright flash that lasted less than a second. You could control the size of the flash by using gradations marked on the inside of the box. Reyes’s favorite feature, though, was the catch that held the spring-hinged door closed if you opened the lid on the top of the box, making it impossible to accidentally ignite the powder while filling the box. She added this after a close call that singed her eyebrows. The air was still tonight, so they didn’t need to worry about blowback.

  “Ready when you are,” Gabe said.

  “Should I wait until the next transmission?” Reyes asked. “He said they’d be passing over Norway shortly.”

  “With a period of a hundred and twenty minutes, they could be overhead right now,” O’Brien said.

  They scanned the northern sky, but saw no sign of the ship.

  “We’ve got plenty of magnesium,” Gabe said. “I say go for it. We can try again later.”

  “Okay,” Reyes said. “You ready, O’Brien?”

  “Ready,” O’Brien said. “Five flashes at three second intervals. Load ‘er up.”

  Reyes reached into the bucket and scooped out a cupful of white powder. She filled the box to the one hundred gram line. “On your mark,” she said. “Watch your eyes.” Looking at the flash probably wouldn’t cause any permanent retinal damage, but it would certainly make you see spots for a few minutes.

  “Go,” O’Brien said.

  Reyes closed her eyes and compressed the bellows. There was a momentary roar, accompanied by a blast of heat on her face. She could see the flash with her eyes closed.

  As soon as the flash had dissipated, she got another scoop of the powder and filled the box to the one hundred gram line again. She looked to O’Brien.

  “Go,” O’Brien said again.

  Reyes shut her eyes and squeezed the bellows once more.

  They repeated this procedure three more times and then waited in silence for several minutes. At last, Carpenter’s voice came over her comm again.

  “Passing over southern Norway now,” Carpenter said. “Oh, this is Michael Carpenter of the IDL exploratory ship Andrea Luhman, calling the… well, if you can hear me, you know who I’m calling. Nobody else is going to have a radio for a thousand years.”

  As Carpenter babbled on, the three spacemen exchanged glances.

  “He didn’t see it,” O’Brien said.

  “How is that possible?” Reyes asked. “Is he even looking?”

  “He’s looking in Norway,” Gabe said. “They’ve got no idea we traveled seven hundred klicks southwest on a Viking ship.”

  “When they don’t find us in Norway, they’ll expand their search parameters,” Reyes said.

  “So should we wait to try again?”

  “No,” Gabe said. “We’ve got clear skies now. Try it once more and then wait for them to come around again.”

  They sent another series of five flashes, with no response from Carpenter. He sent them one more message before Andrea Luhman lost radio contact, but made no mention of the signal.

  “Well, that’s that,” Reyes said. “We should get some sleep. I’ll wake you when I hear from Carpenter again.”

  Another transmission from Carpenter came through a little over an hour later, repeating everything he had told them before. When Reyes exited her tent and looked up, though, she saw no stars. A bank of clouds had moved in. She woke O’Brien.

  “You think it’s worth trying?” she asked.

  O’Brien crawled out of his tent and surveyed the sky. After a moment, he shook his head. “We’d be wasting magnesium. There’s no way they’ll see it through those clouds. You want me to check again in half an hour?”

  Reyes shook her head. “I’ll do it. I’ll wake you if the clouds clear. Go back to sleep.”

  She stayed up the rest of the night, through two more of Andrea Luhman’s orbital cycles, but the clouds never cleared. They showed some sign of clearing after dawn, but by then it was too late: if Carpenter couldn’t see the signal at night, he’d never spot it when the area was bathed in sunlight.

  The clouds eventually cleared in the afternoon,
but returned before sunset and persisted throughout the next night. Carpenter continued to broadcast roughly every hour—once when Andrea Luhman rose above the horizon, once when it was directly over Norway, and once before it disappeared below the horizon in the east. Sometimes the beginning or ending of his transmissions would be cut off, as he was timing them relative to the location of the lander crash. Early the next morning, he switched to a recorded message, which repeated every ten minutes.

  Reyes and the others tried to busy themselves with other tasks, but the blanket of clouds hanging overhead were an all-too-obvious metaphor. As long as the sky remained gray, they had little hope of communicating with Andrea Luhman. Occasionally Carpenter would break in with a live message, detailing Andrea Luhman’s current status. He didn’t mention anything about cloud cover, which told Reyes that the sky over Norway was probably clear. That was bad news: if the crew of Andrea Luhman assumed the landing party was still in Norway, they’d conclude that Reyes and the others were unable to get a signal to them—and the simplest explanation for that fact was that they were dead.

  The clouds remained for two more days. The Norsemen returned from raiding, and work continued on the buildings. It was now nearly summer, and other than the occasional rain, the weather was pleasant to work in. But the spacemen grew more and more anxious, waiting for the clouds to pass. O’Brien suggested taking their signaling apparatus out to sea in search of clear skies, but Reyes nixed the idea. They had no way of knowing where or when the weather might clear, and if they signaled Andrea Luhman while a hundred klicks out to sea, it might just confuse matters further. So they waited.

  On the fourth evening after Carpenter’s first signal, he transmitted an uncharacteristically somber message:

  “Hey, guys, It’s Carpenter again. I don’t know if you’re down there. At this point, I kind of hope you’re not. Dying in that crash may have been the best outcome. But in case you are… Okay, look. Mallick wants to pull the plug. Shit, that’s a bad metaphor. The captain thinks we need to cut our losses. Do our best to try to get to IDL space on aux power. I don’t see the point, but then I guess there’s not much point in staying in orbit around Earth either. Even if you guys can hear me, there’s not much we can do for you. My idea… well, I was thinking we could locate the crashed Cho-ta’an ship and dredge it up from the sea. Repair it and take it back to one of the IDL gates. It’s stupid, I guess. It would take years, and by then the seawater would probably… anyway, there aren’t a lot of good options. The upshot is, we’re breaking orbit in… just over six hours. If you’re still down there, and alive… I’m sorry, guys. And good luck.”

  Reyes broke the news to Gabe and O’Brien, who’d muted the increasingly unwelcome messages from Carpenter. They were sitting around the evening fire, eating porridge and smoked venison. The sun had just gone down, and not a star could be seen in the sky.

  “So that’s it then,” O’Brien said. “We’re on our own.”

  “We could still make contact,” Gabe replied. “But yeah, we should prepare for the possibility that we’re not going to get any help from Carpenter or the others.”

  Reyes wasn’t sure what sort of help to expect in any case. At the very least, she was hoping to get an update on the status of Harald’s forces in Norway. If Andrea Luhman’s crew knew where to look, they could provide some detailed surveillance—assuming the skies were clear. “What do you think of the idea of dredging up the Cho-ta’an ship?” she asked.

  “Sounds nuts to me,” O’Brien replied. “The North Sea has got to be two thousand meters deep. What are we going to do, build a gigantic barge and haul it up with ropes? And how are they even going to find it? They can’t see a ten thousand-lumen flash on the top of a hill in the middle of the night.”

  “They might be able to identify the radiation signature of the reactor, if they have a general idea where it went down,” Reyes said. “But yeah, overall the idea sounds pretty crazy.”

  “So what’s the plan?” O’Brien asked. “We hunker down here and wait for Harald to attack? Do we go on the offensive at some point, or do we keep playing defense forever?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Reyes said. “As long as there’s a chance we can get through to Andrea Luhman, we have to keep trying. We’ve got six hours left.” She got to her feet. The last gray light of day faded in the distance.

  “You’re going to keep signaling?” O’Brien asked. “They’ll never see it through these clouds.”

  “I’m an optimist,” Reyes said, without breaking a smile. “And I’ve got a goddamned barrel full of powdered magnesium to use up.”

  Reyes spent the next two hours loading the signaling apparatus and squeezing the bellows, at intervals of about five seconds. After a few minutes she could do it with her eyes closed, which was a good thing, because even the occasional indirect glimpse of the flashes was enough to temporarily blind her. After two hours, still half-blind and smelling of charred wool, she took a break to get some sleep while O’Brien relieved her. They no longer bothered to pause between signal sequences; they were in no danger of running out of magnesium, and the more flashes they made, the better their chances of being seen. After another two hours, Reyes relieved O’Brien again. Gabe had volunteered to take a shift, but Reyes wanted to be the one manning the apparatus when Andrea Luhman dipped below the horizon for the last time. This whole thing was her idea; if it failed, she would take responsibility.

  Carpenter’s last status report came just before dawn. Andrea Luhman would drop below the horizon shortly, and then break orbit to head back into deep space, where it would limp along for the next two thousand years. As the sky began to lighten in the east, Reyes stopped in the middle of refilling the signaling apparatus, realizing it was over. She’d gambled on a visual signaling system and had been foiled by lousy weather. Those were the breaks. Next time around, she thought ruefully, she’d stick with the spark transmitter.

  And then something twinkled on the horizon, just above the dull gray haze of morning.

  A star!

  And then another. And another. The clouds had cleared, at least partially. With a little luck—

  She slapped the lid of the apparatus closed and squeezed the bellows, then opened it again, dumped another cupful of powder in and did it again. And again, and again, as fast as she could.

  Look, Carpenter, she silently begged. God damn you, look!

  Still there was no sound from her comm. She fired the apparatus again and again.

  Then Carpenters’s voice sounded in her ear. “All right, guys. This is it. We’re passing below the…”

  For a moment, her comm went silent.

  “Well,” he said, his voice crackling with static. “That’s weird. Reyes, is that you? I’m seeing a light, something flashing. Looks like… somewhere in northern France?”

  Reyes trembled with excitement. She forced herself to stop loading the apparatus and counted to ten. Then she fired two quick flashes, waited five seconds, fired a long flash by squeezing the bellows more slowly, fired two more quick flashes, paused for another fire seconds, then fired a quick flash, a long flash, and two more quick flashes.

  “I… D… L…” she heard Carpenter’s voice say. “Holy shit, you guys! You’re alive! You have no idea how close you came being—” The transmission abruptly cut off.

  Reyes collapsed on the ground, tears running down her face.

  She had done it.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  When Andrea Luhman came around again, Carpenter transmitted another message and Reyes sent several more flashes so he could get a fix on their location. He directed their antenna to their location and within ten minutes of his transmission they’d established two-way contact with their comms. Reyes spent the next hour updating them on their situation. Carpenter was left nearly speechless, which was a first.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Slater,” he said at last.

  “Thanks,” Reyes said. “So were we. I didn’t foresee
having to bury a crewmember on a beach off the Frisian coast. Although to be honest, the remarkable thing is that three of us are still alive.”

  “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that you kidnapped the King of Norway.”

  “In our defense,” Gabe said, “he was kind of an asshole.”

  “I thought you’d be more impressed with the gunpowder bomb,” O’Brien said.

  “I’m amazed by all of it,” Carpenter replied. “You’re making my idea of recovering the Cho-ta’an ship seem less crazy.”

  “No, it’s still pretty crazy,” Reyes said. “Just building a ship capable of hoisting that amount of weight... it would take years.”

  Mallick’s voice broke in. “You have something better to do, Reyes?”

  “No, sir,” Reyes said. “If you want to try dredging up a twenty-thousand-ton alien spaceship from the North Sea, we’re game.” If she were honest, she’d admit that their chances of success were around one in a million, but she was willing to go along with the plan if it meant Andrea Luhman would be sticking around for a while. After all, it wasn’t like they had anything better to do either.

  “Good,” Mallick said. “And I’m very happy to hear the three of you are still alive.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Reyes replied. “We’re happy to hear you’re still here.”

  “Now that we’ve found you,” Carpenter said, “I can redirect our efforts toward searching for the Cho-ta’an ship. I’ve got video of the crash, so I can pinpoint where she went down within about three hundred meters. We might find her if I sweep the area with sensors.”

  “Copy that,” Reyes said. “We’ve got a somewhat more pressing issue we were hoping to get your help on, though.”

  “Go ahead, Reyes,” Mallick said.

  “We’re expecting Harald to launch an attack on us. If he hasn’t figured out where we are yet, he will soon. News travels slow here, but it does travel. And we haven’t exactly been keeping a low profile.”