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

by Robert Kroese

  When the first Cho-ta’an ships were twenty hours out from Geneva and Commander Lee had determined that it was too late for them to change course, Philadelphia broke orbit, followed by Renaissance and then Freedom. The ships were designed to maintain a constant acceleration of one gee fully loaded, but since they were half-empty, they could manage as much as one point two gees. They were going to need it. Philadelphia and Renaissance headed roughly at right-angles relative each other toward two different star clusters closer to the center of the galaxy, while Freedom went in nearly the opposite direction, toward Chrylis. Accelerating at one point two gees, it would take nearly eighty-three days to reach the Chrylis gate. Huiskamp could only hope they received word from Kilimanjaro before Freedom reached the gate, or she would be forced to change course and head off into deep space where she would be unlikely to encounter any livable planets for over a thousand years.

  Huiskamp was in his quarters working through the tactics of an orbital attack for the hundredth time when there was a knock on the door. An ensign informed him that a package had arrived for him from Geneva. When he asked why she hadn’t brought it with her, she replied that the package was being kept on the receiving deck for “security reasons.” She had no more information to offer. He dismissed her and made his way down to the cargo receiving deck. There he was directed to a crate that had arrived on a supply ship two hours earlier. It had been added to the freight manifest by the order of someone working for Singh Engineering.

  The crate was cubical, big enough to hold a basketball. He unsealed it and opened the lid. Inside, nestled amid foam packing material, was a helmet.

  It was an ordinary, standard-issue carbon-fiber IDL flight helmet. The only unusual thing about it was the amount of weathering the thing had endured. It looked like it had been left out in the elements for years. He picked the thing up and looked at it. No, it was much older than that. All the rubber and padding had rotted away, and the crew member’s name and insignia had completely faded. Strange, he thought. This style of helmet had only been in use for about eight years. Where had this one been that it had aged so badly in that time?

  An answer was presented in a sheaf of paper that had been left at the bottom of the box, which purported to be the results of radiocarbon dating and several other tests of the enclosed helmet. It bore a hand-written sticky-note that read:

  Admiral –

  Thought you might find this interesting.

  – C. Prince

  If the report was to be believed, the helmet was over a thousand years old. But what jumped out at Huiskamp was a name that was clearly visible in a black-and-white rendering of a UV photo of the helmet: REYES.

  Ten days earlier, he had received a message that Carolyn Reyes and nineteen other members of an IDL research expedition had gone missing after a freak accident with a hyperspace gate. The rest of the report concluded that the helmet had indeed belonged to Carolyn Reyes, an IDL engineer aboard Andrea Luhman. If this was a joke, it was in very poor taste.

  The report bore the logo of the Jörmungandr Foundation—a serpent encircling the Earth, devouring its own tail. Ha-ha, very funny, thought Huiskamp. A space helmet gets sent back in time only to reappear shortly after it disappeared. Time as an endless circle, a snake devouring its own tail. He was tempted to order a raid on Jörmungandr’s headquarters in Geneva City, but there was no point: Geneva was doomed, and he needed to focus his attention on protecting the seedships. Any intelligence gained from a raid would be unlikely to aid in that mission.

  Still, there was something unsettling about it. Andrea Luhman’s mission—and disappearance—was classified. The crew had not been publicly declared deceased or even missing. If Jörmungandr knew about the incident, they had highly-placed operatives inside the IDL. They had revealed the existence of these operatives for what? A hoax involving a fake space helmet? It didn’t add up.

  There was something else bothering him about it. As the admiral responsible for the defense of an entire planet, he was accustomed to cranks trying to get his attention, and sometimes it was difficult to tell the cranks from people with legitimate requests or valuable information. His personal aide, an ensign named Jasmine Umarzai, was adept enough at distinguishing the former from the latter that he’d been surprised to see the director of the Jörmungandr Foundation on his meeting schedule. He’d snapped at Umarzai and cut her off when she tried to explain. He’d been in a bad mood that day—it had been the day he received word that the Cho-ta’an had hacked the gates.

  “Ms. Umarzai,” he said into his wrist comm.

  “Yes, Admiral,” came her voice a moment later.

  “Do you recall your first communication with the director of an organization called the Jörmungandr Foundation? I believe her name is Christina Prince.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “How did she contact you?”

  “It was a direct call via encrypted radio signal on one of the reserved channels, sir. That was one of the reasons I flagged it as high priority. You were occupied at the moment, so I put a meeting on your schedule, but then you asked me to cancel it.”

  “I chewed your head off, did I not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was the time and date of the call?”

  “Hold on a moment and I’ll check, sir.” There was a pause of a few seconds. “The date was two-two-seven dot seven dot fourteen. Time, seventeen hundred forty hours.”

  “That same day, I received a communique from Commodore Averill aboard Mobi-COM regarding the status of an exploratory vessel called Andrea Luhman. Can you tell me the timestamp of that message?”

  “Yes, sir. Just a moment.” Another brief pause. “Eighteen hundred twenty-two hours, sir.”

  Forty-two minutes apart, Huiskamp thought. A coincidence? “Ms. Umarzai, does the text of that message specify the timestamp of the last transmission received by Andrea Luhman before contact was lost?”

  “Yes, sir. Seventeen hundred forty hours.”

  “On the dot?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “To be clear, the last transmission from Andrea Luhman was received by Mobi-COM the same minute the director of Jörmungandr first tried to contact me?”

  “It appears that way, sir.”

  “What did she say she wanted to talk to me about, precisely?”

  “She said she had a piece of IDL property that she wished to return to you.”

  “Those were her exact words?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good work, Ms. Umarzai. That’s all for now.”

  Admiral Huiskamp stood staring at the bleached polycarbonate helmet resting on the counter before him. The helmet could be a fake. The radiocarbon report could have been fabricated. But how to explain the director of Jörmungandr contacting him the exact moment Andrea Luhman disappeared? Had she somehow known that Andrea Luhman had disappeared? Was going to disappear?

  “Ms. Umarzi,” he said.

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Please put me through to the director of the Jörmungandr Foundation.”

  Chapter Seven

  Lauren Foley sat at her desk, eyes closed, forcing herself to take several deep breaths. When she opened her eyes, she felt a bit calmer, but her fundamental situation hadn’t changed: she was in a lot of trouble.

  She had unilaterally altered the mission of the seedships without consulting the President or any other civilian authority. She possessed full authority to handle the logistics of the loading process, but she couldn’t legally alter the mission of the seedships, even with Huiskamp’s approval. The governing body of the HCC was incommunicado, so she could hardly be blamed for not getting their authorization, but she was still legally required to get buy-in from the civilian government of Geneva. She had told herself there simply wasn’t time for such legal niceties, but it was more than that: she didn’t think Blake Adams had the courage to do what needed to be done. Although the President had opposed the seedship project from the beginning, now tha
t it was underway he would insist that the plan be followed to the letter. Changing the plan now would make him liable for the project’s failure. President Adams lived in constant fear of tarnishing his legacy, even though it was beginning to look like there wouldn’t be anyone around to remember him. Somebody had to step up to make the hard decision, and that role had fallen to Lauren Foley.

  From the twelve hundred colonists who originally been chosen, Director Foley had selected thirty-nine girls who ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen. These were to be shuttled to the three seedships in groups of thirteen, along with a doctor, two nurses, and two technicians—all female and under the age of forty. Each ship would then have at least twenty women of childbearing age aboard. The girls, whose parents had already signed contracts that basically surrendered all their rights to the Evac Authority, were selected based in part on a screening that determined their eligibility and willingness to act as surrogate mothers in the interest of sustaining the project. The sudden change in the schedule was explained by the supposed need to acclimate the girls to life on a starship as soon as possible so as to minimize stress during pregnancy.

  The ethics and legality of all this would have been questionable even if the President had given his approval, but there was no other efficient way to get twenty young women of childbearing age onboard each ship. Because of strict genetic and health requirements, the girls had to be selected from the existing colonist candidates, and with few exceptions all the colonists were members of couples or families. The only young single females were minors or those who had reached adulthood after their families were selected to be colonists.

  The girls and their families had, in principle, agreed to all of this. There had been over two hundred million applicants for colonist status, and as part of the application process one was informed in no uncertain terms that while every effort would be made to keep families together, the Evac Authority reserved the right to reject anyone, for any reason, right up to the moment the ships were boarded. This provision was never intended to allow the Evac Authority to steal thirty-nine girls away from their families forever, but desperate times required desperate measures. Lauren Foley mused that for all its technological advances and conquering of space, humanity hadn’t evolved that much: in order to ensure the survival of their kind, they’d been reduced to kidnapping maidens, just like the Vikings had done thirteen hundred years earlier.

  Besides Admiral Huiskamp, only Foley’s personal staff knew of the change to the mission, although others probably suspected. Hundreds of people were involved in the process of shuttling crew and cargo to the seedships, and by now somebody would have figured out that with the revised schedule, there was no way to get all the colonists and cargo on board within the next two weeks. Eventually somebody would inform the President, and his staff would investigate. They would quickly figure out that she’d sabotaged the seedships’ mission. It wouldn’t make any difference that their mission was doomed anyway, or that Admiral Huiskamp had given his approval. Huiskamp, physically and legally outside the President’s sphere of authority, could act with impunity, but Foley could not. President Adams would fire her and most likely have her arrested. She would spend the rest of her days in prison, awaiting trial while the Cho-ta’an took over the planet.

  Looking out her office window, she could see the snowy peaks of the mountains in the distance. Her husband and their three daughters were at a cottage in the mountains east of Geneva City; if she left now, she could have a few hours with them before word reached the President of what she had done. She had spent little enough time with them over the past two years, devoting nearly all her time to developing a plan to get the seedships loaded as quickly and efficiently as possible—a plan that had now been tossed in the garbage.

  She tore herself away from the view. There was still too much to be done. If she was going to commit treason, she might as well be thorough about it. On her desk were three sheets of paper: three lists of colonists, one for each seedship. Fifty-four human beings chosen to survive out of a billion people. It had been hard enough when they had been forced to pick twelve hundred. She pored over the lists for the hundredth time, comparing them to the much longer lists of candidates on her screen. She felt fairly confident about the young girls her staff had selected, but she had some reservation about the technical staff. In particular, she wasn’t certain the doctor who had been selected for the Freedom group was the best choice.

  Pranit Mehta was a well-respected scientist and medical doctor who had served for ten years as the director of the genetics department at one of the most prestigious universities on Geneva. Foley had met him and found him modest, charming and brilliant. He had in fact been the first choice for the position Foley now held; only his wife’s illness had prevented him from accepting. His wife had since died, and he had left the university at the age of fifty to return to private practice. He was in excellent health and could be expected to live at least another thirty years. He had only one liability, as far as the mission was concerned: he was male.

  The doctors Foley’s staff had picked for the other two ships, as well as all the technicians and nurses, were female and under the age of forty. That meant they could serve as surrogate mothers if necessary, giving them a leg up over all the candidates who were male or past child-bearing age. Mehta had been selected because there was no female candidate under forty with a resume like his. If there was one person you’d want overseeing the reproductive future of the human race, it was Pranit Mehta.

  And yet—with only fifty-four slots open, did it make sense to pick a fifty-year-old male? Wouldn’t it be better to pick a young, healthy, female doctor? You didn’t need a PhD to understand the concept of minimum viable population, and in any case, whoever they selected would have little to do but study the problem of genetic diversity for the next twenty years. Did it make sense to trade a uterus for a level of expertise that would probably never be needed? How the hell did you weigh such disparate factors against each other?

  There were still three female doctors under forty among the twelve hundred potential colonists. None of them had a background in genetics, but they all presumably had the potential to learn. Would one of them be a better choice than Pranit Mehta? It was a difficult question.

  But there was another candidate as well, one whose name had been deliberately left off the lists. A female medical doctor, three weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, who had an extensive background in applied genetics. She was healthy and known to be fertile. By any calculus, such a person would be the obvious choice. She had only been left off the list of colonists to forestall accusations of favoritism. But what did that matter now? Lauren Foley was already going to be remembered as a traitor to Geneva and to humanity, assuming there was anyone around to remember her. What difference did one more crime make?

  Her comm chimed. That would be the logistics chief, Elden Grady, wanting the final passenger list for the shuttles. She was already twenty minutes late; if she waited much longer, they would miss their launch window, throwing their schedule even more out of whack. She ignored it, trying to concentrate on the decision she had to make.

  If she replaced Pranit, she would be sentencing him to death. But that was the wrong way to look at it: nearly everyone on Geneva was already sentenced to death. What she had to decide was who was going to live—and she had to decide based not on merit, but on the needs of the human race. Which candidate would maximize the chances of humanity’s survival?

  There was a knock on her door. Foley sighed, her concentration broken. “Yes?”

  Her assistant, Madeline Colson, opened the door. “Ma’am, Calvin Gabor is here to see you. He has some people with him.”

  Foley’s chest tightened. The Director of Planetary Security didn’t just pop in for a friendly visit. “Who is with him?”

  “Men in uniforms. They have guns.”

  “Stall them.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” She closed the door.

  So President
Adams—or, more likely, somebody on his staff—had figured it out already. She wondered if Calvin Gabor had orders to drag her in front of the President to explain herself, or if they were just going to arrest her on the spot.

  Think, Foley commanded herself, staring at the list in her fingers. Try to be objective. She let out an involuntary giggle at this. It had already been impossible to be objective before the President’s goons showed up at her door. The best she could do at this point was trust her instincts—and her instincts told her Pranit Mehta was not the right man for the job.

  She tapped her comm. “Ms. Colson?”

  “Ma’am,” came Madeline Colson’s hushed voice in response. “I’m not sure how much longer I can stall them. They say they’re here on orders from the President.”

  “Tell them I’ll be out in two minutes,” Foley said. “And get me a car, immediately. Have them bring it to the back entrance.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you—?”

  “Just do it.” She terminated the connection and then brought up the passenger lists on her screen. She tabbed to the list for Freedom, made a single change, and then sent it to Eldon Grady with the subject line FINAL PASSENGER LIST. She grabbed her bag from beside her desk, slipped out the door, and ran down the hall toward the rear elevator of the building.