The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic

by Robert Kroese

  “But sir!”

  Huiskamp was aware that several others in the room had ceased what they were doing and were now watching him intently, hanging on his words. Protecting Geneva had always been GODCOM’s primary mission. They were going to have adjust to a new reality—and very quickly.

  “Listen up, everybody,” the admiral said. “Our mission is now to protect those seedships at any cost. Our second priority is protecting the gate. If worse comes to worst, we can use the Chrylis gate or send the seedships across conventional space, but the gates are worthless without the seedships. We have to assume that Mobi-COM is lost, and that Geneva will fall under Cho-ta’an dominion soon. We fought long and hard, but this war is lost. The warning we received two weeks ago appears to have been accurate. The Cho-ta’an are now using our own jumpgates, which means they effectively control the known galaxy. Those three seedships are the only chance humanity has left. I want all of our resources devoted to getting their payloads on board and getting them out of this system and away from the Cho-ta’an as quickly as possible.”

  Stunned silence followed as the three dozen men and women in the room realized what the admiral was saying. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t figured out already, but they hadn’t expected the moment to come so soon and so decisively. Geneva was the closest thing any of them had known to Earth before it was rendered uninhabitable by the Cho-ta’an. Most of them had friends and family there. Geneva’s population was nearly a billion, but many thousands had already died because of the Cho-ta’an blockade of the other IDL gates. Geneva was highly dependent on agrarian planets for food, and over the past few weeks almost no cargo ships had been getting through. If the Cho-ta’an seized the Geneva gate, they wouldn’t even need to attack Geneva to subdue the population: most would starve within weeks. Then the Cho-ta’an could do with the planet as they saw fit. The gravity, at point nine three gees, was a little strong for them, but the planet’s vast mineral resources might make it worthwhile to them. Geneva’s mining potential was probably the reason they wanted to hold the gate rather than destroy it. Perhaps they planned to enslave the surviving human population to work in the mines. More likely they would exterminate the few humans who remained and implement a fully automated mining operation. The one hundred twenty men and women aboard GODCOM would fare little better. GODCOM had enough supplies for its crew to survive two hundred days without resupply from Geneva or one of the other systems.

  “Sir,” Commander Lee said after some time had passed, “even if we devote all our resources to defending the seedships….”

  “I know, Mr. Lee. As long as they’re in orbit, the seedships are sitting ducks.”

  Chapter Four

  Akiva ben Yosef saw the assassins before the Romans did. The sun hung low above the houses on the ridge overlooking the city of Beneberak, and twenty stationarii were on their way back to the garrison near the center of the city. Akiva, returning home from the school where he spent his days instructing young men in the understanding of the Torah, hurried to make it home before dark. The city was under a strict curfew these days, and although he doubted the stationarii would inconvenience themselves to arrest an old rabbi, he preferred not to stir up trouble unnecessarily.

  He had stayed late speaking with a student who disputed Akiva’s proof that the end of days would come in Anno Mundi 6093—twenty-two hundred years hence. The student, who was one of an increasing number of Jews who believed the moschiach currently walked among them, expected the end to come somewhat sooner. The student’s argument rested heavily on his expectation that the temple would soon be rebuilt—an occurrence that Akiva reminded him was far from certain.

  “Have you not heard, Rabbi?” the student asked him. “Simon ben Kosevah’s men have cut off the Roman Garrison at Yerusalem. Two thousand Romans are trapped there, and Rufus can’t spare the men to break the siege. Soon we shall retake the holy mountain.”

  “Aelia Capitolina,” Akiva had corrected the young man. He insisted on using the proper Roman name, not so much because he feared being overheard by the stationarii as because he saw no point in fueling the delusions of those who thought Israel’s salvation was at hand. “In any case, if the time is as short as you suggest,” he admonished the man, “it is all the more reason to be diligent and conscientious in your studies. Look to the Torah, Yeshua, not to bandits posing as saviors.”

  At this the young man grew angry, but he bit his lip rather than lash out at the esteemed teacher. Akiva smiled and put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “The time is indeed growing short,” he said. “Go home and sleep. We will resume our discussion tomorrow.”

  Yeshua nodded. “Thank you, Rabbi,” he said. He turned and ran home. Akiva gathered his things and left as well.

  It was because of this delay that he found himself on a narrow stretch of street facing twenty Roman soldiers marching toward him. Peering down from the roof of a house just ahead of him and to his left was a boy with a sling. The boy grinned at Akiva and put his hand to his lips. Akiva gave the boy a stern look but dared not speak. The boy would not be alone.

  “Move aside, old man,” ordered the leader of the squad of stationarii. The men continued to march toward him, their boots clacking on the stones like distant thunder.

  Akiva stopped in his tracks. He caught a glimpse of movement on a roof to his right as well. The setting sun was in the Romans’ eyes, which was no doubt by design. More young men would be coming up from behind. They had waited for the stationarii to pass through this narrow, western-facing street before they attacked. The Romans had better armor, weapons and training, but the Jews knew the area and could easily disappear into the local populace if the battle went against them. Variations of this scene had played out in several cities across Judaea over the past few months, generally with poor results for the Romans. No doubt the captain was aware of this, which was the reason for his hurry.

  Akiva had no love for the Romans, but neither did he see any point in these ambushes. In the short term, they might satisfy the Jews’ desire for vengeance against the occupiers for their oppressive decrees and desecration of the Temple Mount, but ultimately there could be only one outcome: the boot of Rome would come down even harder on the neck of Israel.

  Anxious to find a way to forestall the impending violence, Akiva assessed his options. If he could get the soldiers to pause for a moment, the sun would dip behind the buildings and the attackers’ advantage would be nullified. The rebels would not attack if they were on an even footing with the Romans. He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Move or I’ll grab you by that beard and hurl you aside,” growled the captain. They were moving at double-time, and were now only a few paces from Akiva. Akiva closed his mouth and stepped aside—not in fear, but in anger. He was a rabbi—a respected teacher of the Torah. These gentile invaders had no right to speak to him this way. As the stationarii marched past, he knelt in a doorway and closed his eyes.

  There was the sound of a stone striking an iron helmet. A man cried out. A dozen more stones struck, and cries of “Rak Chazak Amats!” rang out in the street. The Roman captain shouted orders for his men to stand their ground. Armored bodies clanged against the stones of the street.

  “Adonai, may your will be done,” Akiva murmured.

  Chapter Five

  Lauren Foley, director of the Geneva Planetary Evacuation Authority, colloquially known as Evac, was not receptive to Huiskamp’s idea of an accelerated loading schedule.

  “Understand, Admiral,” said Foley in her characteristic near-monotone, “that this schedule is the result of two years of intense logistical planning and a borderline-illegal commandeering of nearly a hundred civilian vessels. A monumental effort was required to get the loading time down to four weeks. And now you’re telling me—six days into the process, I might add—that I need to do it in a week and a half.” Foley had been chosen for the post by a committee representing the Human Colonization Consortium, which was ostensibly the parent organizat
ion of the IDL. In reality, both the HCC and the various planetary governments were largely puppets of the IDL. Civilian bureaucrats like Foley tended to resent the leverage the military authority had over them and looked for every opportunity to assert their independence. Admiral Huiskamp had met Foley on a few occasions and knew the type. Still, she was at heart a scientist who would listen to reason. Certainly more so than the hot-headed President Blake Adams—which was why Huiskamp hadn’t yet gone over her head. That and the fact that Adams was currently dealing with a planet-wide insurrection against his government.

  “I understand your frustration, Dr. Foley. Unfortunately, the harsh reality of the situation is that we have, at most, five days to get those seedships out of orbit.”

  “Oh, is it harsh reality we’re talking about now, Admiral?” Foley said with a slight smirk. “Is that the reality of Cho-ta’an ships suddenly being able to slip past your sentinel drones? Look, I don’t blame you for the snow job the other day. What else could you do? But if you expect me to upset everything I’ve worked for over the past two years, you need to level with me. How did it happen?”

  It was clear to Huiskamp that his Pollyanna routine wasn’t going to work with Director Foley. He would have to lay his cards on the table and hope for the best. “The Cho-ta’an have hacked the gates.”

  “I thought so,” Foley said. “It was the only way those ships could have gotten so far into the system undetected. I take it more ships arrived?”

  “Forty, in addition to the twenty-four already here. They lost fourteen interceptors taking out our gate defenses, leaving a total of fifty.”

  “So far.”

  “So far, yes.”

  “Do you have any idea if more are on their way, or when they might arrive?”

  “I’m afraid there’s no way to know. Even before this, we were in the dark about the locations of most of the Cho-ta’an forces. These ships could have come from anywhere. Any gate can theoretically be used to travel instantaneously to any other gate.”

  “I thought the security locks were supposed to activate the gates only for vessels broadcasting an encrypted code key from an onboard transponder.”

  “That’s right. Those locks were always a clumsy workaround, though. The dirty little secret of the jumpgates is that no one really understands how they work.”

  “They warp spacetime to allow instantaneous travel between two distant locations.”

  “Yes,” said Huiskamp, “but nobody knows how they do this.”

  “How is that possible? We built the gates. We must know how they work.”

  “We reverse-engineered the gates based on an existing model. Imagine carefully taking apart an airplane, drawing a schematic based on the disassembled airplane, and then building a new airplane based on the schematic. The resulting airplane, if constructed faithfully, would be capable of flight even if the engineers involved in deconstruction of the original had zero understanding of aerodynamics.”

  “But surely an engineer capable of this feat would be capable of learning the principles of aerodynamics.”

  “Perhaps, with enough time and effort. But suppose the principles of aerodynamics are so complex that they are, for all practical purposes, impossible for humans to understand.”

  “If that were the case, then the design of an airplane would be more complex as well. So again, an engineer capable of building an airplane would be capable of understanding the principles behind it.”

  “Not necessarily,” Huiskamp said. “In fact, aerodynamics is a good example, because no one really understands the principle of turbulence. That is, we can predict the flow of air around an object with some statistical certainty, but we still lack a comprehensive scientific theory of turbulence. Of course, a statistical description is all you generally need to fly an airplane, but airplanes still sometimes crash for reasons we don’t fully understand.” Huiskamp was no expert on the physics of the gates, but he had made a point of understanding the limitations of the IDL’s understanding of them, since it was essentially technology borrowed from the enemy.

  “You’re saying that the Cho-ta’an are doing the equivalent of exploiting some feature of turbulence that we are unaware of to use our airplanes against us.”

  “It’s a poor analogy, but yes. What I’m going to tell you now is highly classified, but the basic facts have also been widely disseminated by conspiracy theorists across G-Net, so I suppose there’s no harm in telling you.”

  “Particularly since we are facing the likely extinction of our species.”

  “Indeed,” Huiskamp said. “We build our gates from a blueprint created by reverse-engineering a Cho-ta’an gate. Once constructed according to this blueprint, a gate responds to a radio signal specifying the coordinates of another gate, in a predefined format, opening a wormhole between the gate receiving the coordinates and the destination gate. The signal is unencrypted, meaning that anyone who knows the appropriate signal format and radio frequency, as well as the location of a second gate, can use one gate to travel to another.”

  “Incredible. I’d heard the theory, but I never believed it.”

  “I’m afraid it’s true. There is no way to deactivate a gate per se. The IDL’s strategy to prevent the Cho-ta’an from using human gates was threefold: First, they installed a transmitter that jammed radio signals on all frequencies for several thousand kilometers. Second, they equipped the gates with batteries of missiles and railguns that would fire automatically on unidentified ships. Third, they installed attitude thrusters along the periphery of the gates to allow them to be reoriented very quickly, preventing the passage of ships through the open center of the torus. All of these precautions are controlled by a computer that is programmed to respond to an encrypted code key transmitted by a tight-beam laser. My understanding is that this system is virtually impossible to hack.”

  “So the Cho-ta’an bypassed it entirely.”

  “Correct. Our best guess is that the Cho-ta’an have figured out a way to get a radio signal through the jamming field, allowing them to instruct the gate to transport them to their desired destination.”

  “But the missiles still work, do they not?”

  “Missiles and railguns, yes. But this is a brute force problem—or, more accurately, a brute velocity problem. If the Cho-ta’an ships travel fast enough, the gate defenses don’t have time to activate before they slip through. Gate lidar can theoretically identify ships at a distance of over ten thousand kilometers, but the Cho-ta’an have developed stealth technology that make their ships nearly invisible head-on until they’re within about a hundred kilometers. So if a Cho-ta’an ship approaches a gate at 3000 kilometers per second, the gate’s defenses have a thirtieth of a second to identify the ship as an enemy and act. Even if the identification process is virtually instantaneous, that simply doesn’t leave enough time for the defenses to work. The fastest missiles take nearly a full second to launch. Even a railgun that is charged and ready to fire can’t get a projectile to its target that fast. Rotating the gate takes even longer. We’ve experimented with high-powered burst energy weapons, but Cho-ta’an warships are heavily shielded. We’ve tried more primitive ways of securing the gates as well, such as smart mines that move out of the way of IDL ships while blocking Cho-ta’an ships, but the Cho-ta’an learned that they could effectively clear a minefield by sending through a few decoy ‘ships’ constructed from iron-heavy asteroids.”

  “In short, if the Cho-ta’an have figured out how to get around the signal-jamming mechanism, there is no good way of keeping them from coming through.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So at any moment, more ships could appear in the Geneva system.”

  “Yes. And frankly, nine destroyers and forty-one interceptors is already more than we can deal with.”

  “Do you not have some sort of failsafe on the gates? A self-destruct mechanism?”

  “We do. Unfortunately, it requires a communication link with the gate, and the Cho
-ta’an are disrupting the signal.”

  “So the defense forces we’ve spent so much of our resources building turn out to be useless.”

  “Not useless. We can give the seedships some protection once they are underway, but no matter how much firepower we have, the seedships are vulnerable as long as they are in orbit. We’ve got to get them in and out fast.”

  “Upsetting two years of planning.”

  “We got the load time down to three weeks because we knew the Cho-ta’an would attempt an attack if they learned about the seedships. We just didn’t realize it was going to be this tight.”

  “Then you expect these fifty enemy ships—and possibly others—to arrive in Geneva orbit in five days?”

  “That’s our current projection, yes. I doubt more ships will be participating in the first wave attack. Rendezvousing two separate groups while on an intercept course with Geneva is complicated enough. And as I say, fifty ships is more than sufficient.”

  “And you expect them to target the seedships?”

  “Yes. I don’t think the Cho-ta’an arriving on the heels of the seedships is a coincidence. The Cho-ta’an have us cornered. They could have taken their time and amassed a fleet in-system, but they’ve hauled ass to get here, if you’ll pardon the expression. They want to take out those seedships before the blight of humanity spreads beyond their reach.”

  “Well, if you expect them to get to Geneva in five days, they’ll get their wish. There’s no way we can get the seedships loaded in time.”

  “Is it possible to prioritize loading one ship over the others?”

  “And then what? Use the other two as decoys?” The director did not wait for an answer to her question. “In any case, the answer is no. You can’t build a skyscraper three times as fast with three times the resources. We have to coordinate hundreds of ships launching from a dozen different locations, adjusting for variables such as severe weather, massive civil unrest, power outages, et cetera. The schedule is the schedule, Admiral.”