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

by Robert Kroese

  The force pulling Huiskamp to his left ceased as the thrusters cut out, and they were once again weightless. Explosions erupted on every cam screen. The closer ones were Cho-ta’an missiles striking chaff; the more distant ones were IDL missiles aimed at the Cho-ta’an. With any luck, there had been enough of them that a few got through their countermeasures.

  The Command Deck rattled as debris struck GODCOM, but the status display showed no more breaches. The tactical display showed the IDL ships passing directly under the Cho-ta’an. GODCOM was a yellow dot inside a swarm of red. Aguilar had done better than matching the Cho-ta’an ships’ orbit: she’d piloted the station smack into the middle of the Cho-ta’an fleet.

  “Shut that thing off!” Huiskamp shouted, and a second later the proximity warning ceased. For a moment, all was still and quiet. Distant flashes of light were visible on several of the screens. That was good news: light meant fire, and fire meant oxygen spilling into space. Several Cho-ta’an ships were seriously damaged. The tactical readout said sixteen ships remained. As Huiskamp watched, the number changed to fifteen, and then fourteen. No IDL ships had been lost. They slipped underneath the Cho-ta’an, passing out of range.

  The remaining Cho-ta’an ships were spread out across an area about fifty kilometers in diameter, roughly level with Geneva’s surface. GODCOM’s new orbit didn’t quite match that of the Cho-ta’an, and it appeared that soon she would be above the area occupied by the enemy ships. She would remain in range for several more minutes, and now the Cho-ta’an didn’t have to worry about taking fire from two directions at once. Warning lights indicated streams of railgun projectiles.

  “Return fire!” Huiskamp barked, but Lee was already on it. He’d directed the station’s railguns at the nearest ship—a destroyer that was only about five klicks away and getting closer. Railguns—both GODCOM’s and the destroyer’s—were deadly accurate at this range. The only question was whether the Cho-ta’an ship or GODCOM would break apart first. Fortunately the rest of the Cho-ta’an ships held their fire, probably to avoid taking out one of their own.

  Two more sections of the station lit up red. Half of GODCOM was now out of commission. The destroyer was so close that it was clearly visible coming toward them on the cam screen. No, he was mistaken. It was no longer a single ship coming at them, but a cluster of ship fragments. They’d torn the destroyer to pieces, but the pieces were now coming at them at several kilometers per second. The last of GODCOM’s missiles raced out to meet the largest section, blowing it apart, but half a dozen smaller sections—many of them several meters across—were still coming.

  “Brace yourselves, everybody,” Huiskamp said. “This is going to be rough.”

  A boom like a thunderclap sounded as the first fragment struck. All the screens went black. Stars slid past on the few exposed windows as GODCOM was shoved off course. Another piece hit, somewhere farther away, and there was the sound of metal tearing, followed by several explosions. A third fragment struck, with a boom even louder than the first, and suddenly they were spinning wildly—but around a much tighter axis than GODCOM’s central hub. A section of the station including the command deck had broken off from the rest of the station and was now spinning independently. Fighting nausea, Huiskamp reflected that it was a testament to GODCOM’s designers that the command deck remained pressurized. Then something struck him on the back of the head and he lost consciousness.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At its peak the Interstellar Defense League had in its service three hundred twenty-nine warships capable of deep space travel. The number of people certified to captain these ships was never over four hundred. Jason Huiskamp had met nearly all of them. One of them had been his father, Admiral Cole Huiskamp, who had been aboard GODCOM when it was destroyed. Of the rest, all but two were missing in action or known to be deceased. Jason was one. Cora Sloan, captain of IDLS Renaissance, was the other.

  Less than a day after GODCOM was destroyed, Alpha and Beta wings had caught up to the Cho-ta’an pursuing the Renaissance and Philadelphia, respectively. The IDL gave the Cho-ta’an a hell of a fight, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. In the end, all twenty IDL ships were destroyed, having taken out another thirteen Cho-ta’an vessels. That left nine enemy vessels chasing the two seedships—a destroyer and four interceptors after Renaissance and five interceptors on Philadelphia’s tail.

  The seedships were designed to maintain a constant one gee acceleration to simulate Earth gravity during the long voyage of the colonists, but they had left orbit a little over half-laden, and between the lighter-than-expected mass and some tweaks to the engines, Renaissance and the Philadelphia had managed about one point three gees over the past four days. Freedom, which by the luck of the draw had ended up with a slightly lighter load than the others, had hit nearly one point four gees. It made for an uncomfortable ride, although this was somewhat compensated for by the colonists having about ten times as much living area per person as they’d expected. The additional acceleration had bought the seedships some time, but not enough. It had taken the ten Cho-ta’an warships still on Philadelphia’s tail four days accelerating at nearly one point five gees, but they’d caught up. Twenty-three hours after Alpha and Beta wings were destroyed, Jason and the bridge crew of Freedom had listened to the last audio transmission from Captain Christophe Landa of Philadelphia as it was violently depressurized by Cho-ta’an railguns.

  At present, Jason and the bridge crew on Freedom were listening to what was very likely the last transmission from Cora Sloan as the Cho-ta’an closed with Renaissance. The transmission, received over a distance of nearly four billion kilometers, was broken and nearly inaudible, even with Freedom’s audio enhancement algorithms. The signal had taken almost four hours to reach them.

  “…is it for us,” Captain Sloan was saying. “Deployed chaff, but there are just too many … fires in the [garbled] and one of the holds … three of them with our railguns … shit, tore through the … pressure dropping fast … dump cargo if you can. Probably wouldn’t have made a difference … fare better than [garbled] … an honor to serve with you two….”

  “That appears to be the end of the transmission, sir,” said Ensign Josh Creed, Freedom’s communications officer. Creed, a slightly built man with thinning brown hair, was the youngest member of the bridge crew. He was competent but over-serious in the way that conscientious but less experienced crew members tended to be.

  “Thank you, Mr. Creed.”

  The bridge crew was silent for some time, and the last words of Captain Sloan seemed to hang in the air. Sloan had never known that Philadelphia had already been destroyed by the Cho-ta’an. She and Renaissance had met their respective ends less than an hour apart but separated by three billion kilometers. Now Freedom, pursued by the fourteen enemy ships that had escaped the suicidal final assault by GODCOM, was humanity’s last chance—and a slim chance it was.

  Freedom had only spotted the eleven Cho-ta’an ships about three hours earlier. Cho-ta’an ships used cloaking fields that made them difficult to spot at a distance; Freedom’s sensors picked them up only because they had known exactly which direction to look. There seemed to be nine interceptors and two destroyers, following Freedom at a distance of about two million kilometers and closing. At their current rate of acceleration relative to Freedom’s, they would be in missile range within a day.

  Jason didn’t fault his father for failing to protect Freedom—on the contrary, his father’s error had been thinking he could save two of the three seedships. As a result, all three would be destroyed. Jason smiled bitterly to himself, musing on the irony that in the end, the undoing of the tough-as-nails IDL admiral had been that he was too soft-hearted.

  Jason didn’t intend to make that mistake. Freedom might be doomed, but it would not fail in its mission because of an excess of sentimentality. If there was one thing Jason had learned in his eighteen years in the IDL, it was how to make tough decisions.

  As if on cue, Josh Cr
eed said, “Captain, Lauren Foley is requesting to speak with you again.”

  Jason stifled a groan. Foley was the de facto leader of the colonists aboard Freedom. Until two days ago, she had been the Director of the Geneva Planetary Evacuation Authority. Jason wasn’t entirely clear on how she had ended up on Freedom; at the last minute, someone had removed Pranit Mehta from the shuttle’s passenger manifest and added Foley in his place. For all he knew, Foley had done it herself, but he couldn’t get any straight answers out of the Geneva government. The President was in hiding and incommunicado and Calvin Gabor, the top law enforcement authority, had apparently either quit or had been fired. Geneva was devolving into chaos.

  However it had happened, Foley was now one of two medical doctors aboard Freedom, the other being twenty-eight-year old Adam Zotov, who had joined the IDL right out of medical school. Foley was also a renowned geneticist, which made her perhaps the most important person on the ship. They needed her, and she knew it.

  Neither the mysterious circumstances of Foley’s inclusion among the colonists nor her entitled attitude endeared her to Jason. He had no desire to speak with her even at the best of times, and he certainly didn’t need the distraction while he was trying to deal with eleven enemy ships on his tail. As long as some slight possibility still existed that Freedom would be able to fulfil its mission, however, it was in his interest to keep Foley mollified.

  “Put her through, Mr. Creed.”

  A moment later, he was looking at the stern but not unattractive face of Lauren Foley. She was a short, heavyset but well-proportioned woman, with fine features that were framed by sandy brown hair that was pulled into a ponytail behind her head.

  “Captain,” she said, with a slight nod. No thank you for agreeing to speak with me. Just the bare minimum acknowledgement of rank.

  “What can I help you with, Dr. Foley?” It was a childish game they were playing, jockeying for position, and Jason reminded himself that pride was a type of sentiment as well.

  “You could tell us what the hell is going on, for starters. We’re human beings, Captain, not cargo.” She had a point: nothing had been communicated to the fifteen colonists regarding the status of Freedom or the other seedships since Jason had broadcast a warning that they would be accelerating to one point four gees two days earlier. Jason would have arranged for the colonists to remain in stasis for the first part of their voyage, but in their haste to get the seedships loaded, the stasis pods had been left behind. Only six pods, for use by the crew, had been installed during Freedom’s construction. The engineering plans called for forty, but construction had been expedited to evade the Cho-ta’an.

  “My apologies, Dr. Foley. In truth, there hasn’t been much news until recently. We’ve received no transmissions from Geneva or GODCOM for twenty-seven hours.”

  “And the other seedships?”

  “I’m afraid the news of our sister ships is not good. Both have been destroyed by the Cho-ta’an.”

  “My God. We’re all that’s left?”

  “Of the seedships, yes. We believe several IDL ships are still active, notably the battleship Kilimanjaro.”

  “I assume the bone-crushing gravity we’re experiencing is the result of our efforts to outrun the Cho-ta’an?”

  “That’s right. Luckily, we ended up with a slightly lighter load than Philadelphia and Renaissance, allowing us to maintain a higher rate of acceleration. I know it’s not easy, but trust me—the alternative is worse.”

  “How many ships are chasing us?”

  “Eleven that we know of.”

  “And you expect to outrun them?”

  “Yes. It will be close, but we should be able to reach the Chrylis gate before them. We’ll jump to the Procyon system, where we will rendezvous with Kilimanjaro. Kilimanjaro will escort us beyond the reach of the Cho-ta’an.”

  “How fast will we be going when we reach the Chrylis gate?”

  “About point three light speed.”

  “Has a ship ever gone through a gate at that velocity?”

  Only one, thought Jason. And we have no idea what happened to her. “No, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.”

  “Assuming we can thread the needle.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you made contact with Kilimanjaro?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Won’t it be a problem if we show up in the Procyon system traveling at point three light speed and Kilimanjaro hasn’t accelerated to match our velocity?”

  She’s too smart, though Jason. Most civilians—even those of a scientific bent—had a poor grasp of the distances and velocities involved in interstellar travel. Foley, however, had picked up on the problem right away. “We expect to make contact with Kilimanjaro soon,” he said. “Military ships are capable of much greater acceleration than seedships, so they shouldn’t have a problem catching up with us.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Foley.

  She knows I’m lying, thought Jason. I should have gone with my instinct and refused her call. Nothing good can come of this. “One more thing you ought to know,” he said. “We’re going to be ditching some of our cargo. To outrun the Cho-ta’an, we need to shed a few tons of mass. Nothing important; we’ve got a lot of stuff we don’t need, since we only have thirty-six people on board. I wanted you to know because we’ll need to cut the engines. I’ll make an announcement, but you should prepare your people for a few hours of zero gee.”

  “I appreciate the warning. Does this mean we can look forward to even greater acceleration when you re-engage the engines?”

  “I’m afraid so. We’ll need as much acceleration as we can muster to beat the Cho-ta’an to the gate.”

  “Thank you for your candor, Captain. This meeting has been very informative.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Admiral Cole Huiskamp dreamed of a snake biting its own tail.

  He awoke in his own bed, strapped in with the zero-gee netting. A dull ache throbbed in his head, the top of which was wrapped in gauze. A tube connected to the inside of his left arm led from a pressurized cannister affixed to a hook on the ceiling. A glance at his wrist comm told him it had been nineteen hours since GODCOM had been torn apart. Nineteen hours in bed, floating through space inside the remnants of a destroyed space station.

  Why am I alive? he asked himself. In the dim light of the room an answer came to him in the form of the dull sheen from a polycarbonate globe hanging in cargo netting about an arm’s length from his face. The helmet. A thirteen-hundred-year-old helmet that had been manufactured three years ago, according to the serial number noted in the Jörmungandr report.

  Impossible. Ridiculous. And yet, what other explanation was there? Jörmungandr had somehow learned the name of the members of an expedition that had inexplicably disappeared, immediately manufactured an artificially aged IDL helmet, dummied up a radiocarbon test report and sent both to the director of the Geneva evacuation effort? Listening to Christina Price’s pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, he’d been prepared to dismiss the whole thing as a red herring, but now the helmet faced him as a brute fact of reality. There had to be an explanation. Just like there had to be an explanation for why he was alive.

  No, my thinking is muddled. I’m conflating causality with teleology. There can be a causal explanation for why I’m alive even if there is no reason for me to be alive. And yet—I am more than the sum of the interactions of particles that make up my body. If I didn’t believe I had a reason for being, I wouldn’t have chosen this career. I believed I could save Geneva from the Cho-ta’an, but I was wrong. But if my purpose vanished along with GODCOM, then why am I here?

  He knew it was the wrong question to ask, but it wouldn’t go away. And the only answer he could find was the dull sheen of bleached polycarbonate just visible in the near-darkness.

  Huiskamp pulled out the IV and got out of bed. He pulled off the bandage and examined the wound in the mirror. It didn’t look too bad. A glancing blow from something w
ith a sharp corner had opened a triangular laceration a few centimeters across on the back of his head. Someone had cleaned and sealed it. He washed up, got dressed, ate half a nutrition bar, and made his way to the command deck.

  Without the pseudogravity to help him along, he had to pull himself down the pole, and although the energy required was minimal, he was trembling and breathing heavy by the time he reached the command deck. He steadied himself, took several deep breaths, and then opened the door to the command deck.

  The command deck was quiet and nearly as dim as Huiskamp’s quarters. The 360 display and most of the monitors were dark, but Aguilar, Lee and Haas sat strapped into their chairs. Aguilar stared at her screen; the others appeared to be asleep.

  “Admiral!” said Aguilar as Huiskamp approached, pulling himself on a guardrail that had been superfluous while the station was spinning. “You should be in bed!” Aguilar’s voice was hoarse, and even in the minimal light Huiskamp could make out dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked like she had aged ten years while he was out.

  “And yet, here I am. Status report.” He pushed off the rail toward his chair, grabbed onto a handle to halt his momentum, and then pulled himself into the chair and began to secure his restraints.

  “Yes, sir. Well, um, all that’s left of GODCOM is a section of the outer rim about one hundred meters long, along with most of the northern spoke. Spinward we lost everything past the galley. Antispinward everything is gone past engineering. As far as we can tell, the northern spoke was torn away from the hub by railgun fire. Then we took two clean hits from debris, one on either side of the command deck. Our spin pulled us away from the wreckage. Cabins auto-sealed so we lost minimal atmosphere. Frankly, sir, it’s a miracle we’re alive.” She spoke it as a simple fact, without enthusiasm. She tapped a few keys and a diagram appeared on Huiskamp’s console screen. It was a rendering of a section of GODCOM shaped roughly like a workman’s pick, with the spoke acting as the handle.