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

by Robert Kroese

  As a high-ranking officer in the IDL, Jason possessed the destruct code. If he transmitted it now, it would reach the Chrylis gate in about ten days. Assuming the Cho-ta’an hadn’t seized the gate by that time and shielded it with their distortion field, the gate would explode, cutting off Freedom’s escape route but also severing one of the two conduits that would allow the Cho-ta’an into the Geneva system. If the IDL could somehow destroy the Geneva gate, that would strand the Cho-ta’an ships in-system, separating them from the rest of their fleet by twenty light years. Humanity would have a chance.

  “Mr. Olson,” Jason said to his navigator, “how long until the Cho-ta’an have us in range?”

  “A little less than twenty hours, sir,” Olson said. Commander Devin Olson was a heavyset man with strawberry blond hair who always seemed to have five o’clock shadow no matter what time it was. Jason thought he looked more like a lumberjack than a navigator on a spaceship, but his simple features and somewhat goofy demeanor belied a sharp mind and quiet confidence.

  Jason thought for a moment. “Mr. Creed, transmit a message to the Geneva system. All frequencies, maximum power, unencrypted.”

  “Aye, Captain. Ready for message.”

  “This is Captain Jason Huiskamp of IDLS Freedom. This message is intended for anyone in the Geneva system capable of understanding it. I am the captain of the last surviving seedship. Freedom’s sister vessels, Renaissance and Philadelphia, have been destroyed by the Cho-ta’an with all souls aboard. Twenty IDL ships dispatched to protect these two ships were destroyed as well. There were no survivors. We are being pursued by eleven enemy ships and possess insufficient firepower to repel them. We expect to be within range of the enemy weapons within twenty hours. It has become clear that the seedship project was a failure. Nearly all IDL ships both in and outside the Geneva system have been destroyed. Humanity’s hope now rests on the population of the last remaining human-occupied planet, Geneva. You must unite against the Cho-ta’an menace and fight back. But to have a chance, we must cut off the Cho-ta’an fleet’s access to the Geneva system. This will be difficult, as the Cho-ta’an have hacked the hyperspace gates. I repeat: the enemy has breached the security on the gates. Additionally, the Cho-ta’an currently control the Geneva gate and probably several of our other gates. The gates have become a liability. The IDL has attempted to destroy the Geneva gate, but the Cho-ta’an have deployed a distortion field that prevents the destruct code from getting through. I do not know whether the Chrylis gate is also protected by a distortion field, but upon termination of this message, I will send the destruct code to the Chrylis gate in an attempt to destroy it. The destruct code is also appended to this message. You must find a way to destroy the Geneva gate, by any means necessary. If you cannot get a signal through, you will have to find another way. Good luck and godspeed. End message.”

  “Message recorded, sir. Do you really want to append the gate destruct code?”

  “Yes. You can find it in the safe in my quarters. Access code One one six five two nine seven.”

  “I feel obligated to remind you that it’s a serious violation of IDL protocol to share the destruct code with a junior officer, to say nothing of broadcasting it to an entire system. Not to mention the enemy. Sir.”

  “May I be so lucky as to be court-martialed,” Jason said. “Hell, maybe we’ll get really lucky and some disgruntled Cho-ta’an will blow up our gates for us. Just do it, Creed. And then send the destruct code to the Chrylis gate.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Do we have a new heading, Captain?” asked Olson.

  “Maintain current heading, Mr. Olson.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Creed located the code and transmitted it along with the captain’s message to the Geneva system. Then he sent the code to the Chrylis gate.

  The code would take nearly ten days to reach the Chrylis gate. Jason figured the odds of it getting through were about fifty-fifty. The distortion field device the Cho-ta’an had used on the Geneva gate seemed to be a relatively new innovation, so even if the Cho-ta’an had seized the Chrylis gate, they might not be jamming it yet. For the sake of the people on Geneva, he hoped the signal got through.

  At the same time, he still held out faint hope that Kilimanjaro was waiting at the Procyon gate. Even if she were, though, it would do Freedom little good if they couldn’t communicate with her. To escort Freedom out of the system, Kilimanjaro would have to start accelerating hard very soon. If Freedom came through the Chrylis gate at a quarter of light speed with eleven Cho-ta’an warships on her tail, Kilimanjaro wouldn’t be able to get a single shot off if she were standing still relative to the gate. Freedom and the Cho-ta’an would zip past her and be a million klicks away before Admiral Chiang even knew what had happened.

  There was no way to know for certain whether the destruct code had gone through. Freedom could ping the gate to see whether it was still online, but getting a response would take almost three weeks, and a lack of response could simply mean that the Cho-ta’an were jamming communications. There was only one way to make certain the gate was destroyed.

  “Mr. Olson, prepare to cut the engines.”

  “Sir, the Choties are nineteen hours behind us and closing.”

  “No way around it, Mr. Olson. We need to dump some cargo. Too risky to do it while accelerating.”

  “Aye, sir. What are we dumping?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything, sir?”

  “In case it’s escaped your attention, Mr. Olson, we’re not getting out of this. Our best chance to strike an effective blow against the Cho-ta’an at this point is to take out the Chrylis gate.”

  “You mean ram it, sir?”

  “Any objections?” Jason asked. For some time, no one spoke. “Really?” Jason said at last. “I’m about to destroy two of the most expensive objects in the galaxy by smashing one into the other at seventy-five thousand klicks per second, and nobody has anything to say?”

  Lieutenant Mika Schwartz, the weapons chief and fourth member of the bridge crew, turned to face him. “At this rate of acceleration, sir,” she said, “we’re probably going to hit it anyway, so we might as well do it on purpose.” There was no hint of a smile on her face. Schwartz, a compact, muscular woman with close-cropped red-brown hair, was Freedom’s resident cynic.

  “At least it will be over with quickly,” said Creed. If they rammed the gate, everyone on board would die.

  “Are we ditching the lander?” asked Schwartz.

  “Everything,” said Jason. The lander, a small craft designed to explore planets thought suitable for colonization, could theoretically be used to save some of the passengers, but there was no place for them to go. Anyone on board would starve to death in deep space—if they weren’t hunted down by the Cho-ta’an first. There were no escape pods aboard Freedom; the seedship was the escape pod.

  “I don’t mean to rain on the party,” said Olson, rubbing the reddish-blond stubble on his chin, “but I’m not sure we can do it. We need to pick up our speed if we’re going to get there ahead of the Cho-ta’an.”

  “What’s our max acceleration if we drop all of our cargo?”

  Olson punched some calculations into his console. “About one point six, sir. Maybe a little more if we start spacing passengers.”

  “Probably not necessary, Olson, although I appreciate the out-of-the-box thinking. I think one point six will do.”

  “To be clear, sir,” said Creed, “you’re suggesting dropping all the colonists’ food and supplies?”

  “There’s enough food in the galleys for everyone on board to live for six weeks without ever dipping into our cargo.”

  “The medical equipment as well? And the TGP?”

  “All of it. Freedom is no longer a seedship. It’s a weapon aimed at the Chrylis gate.”

  “Do we tell the colonists?” Mika Schwartz asked.

  “I informed Lauren Foley we would likely be dumping cargo.”

 
; “With respect, sir,” asked Josh Creed, “don’t they deserve to know we’re on a suicide mission?”

  Jason shook his head. “They knew what they were getting into. Passengers have no say in tactical or navigational decisions. The only thing we’d accomplish by making a general announcement is creating a panic.”

  “You could talk to Dr. Foley privately, sir. It’s her responsibility to manage the colonists. Maybe she can prepare them without—”

  “No, Mr. Creed. The passengers have all the information they need.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  What Jason didn’t say was that he suspected Lauren Foley had already figured out they weren’t going to make it through the gate. If she wanted to hold a meeting with the colonists to prepare them for that possibility, that was up to her, but taking away any hope they might have seemed pointless.

  “What about our weapons?” asked Schwartz. “We could lose a few tons by firing all our missiles and emptying our railguns. Hell, at this range we might even take out a Chotie or two.”

  “That’s an excellent idea, Schwartz,” Jason replied. “For that matter, they’re going to have a hell of a time trying to dodge our cargo. In fact… Ms. Schwartz, how do you feel about getting some target practice?”

  Schwartz grinned. “I’m thinking that with a few well-aimed missiles, we could litter space with junk for ten million kilometers. If we wait until the Choties are almost in range, they’ll never change course in time.”

  “Excellent. Make it happen.”

  Freedom continued to accelerate on a course toward the Chrylis gate for another fifteen hours, during which the crew got ready to dump the cargo as quickly as possible. Unloading would go a lot faster than loading, as the cargo was mostly in discrete containers that were designed to be jettisoned in case of emergency. To safely jettison the containers, though, Freedom would have to be at near zero acceleration: otherwise latches would be likely to buckle or shear off, causing containers to get stuck or strike the hull.

  The passengers were informed of the plan to ditch the cargo, but as of the moment Commander Olson cut the engines, only the crew knew of the intent to ram the Chrylis gate. Because of the last-minute reorganization of the seedships’ mission, there had been more fraternization between the crew of Freedom and her passengers than Jason would have liked, and he suspected the passengers would soon figure out what was going on. As long as they could jettison the cargo before that happened, though, it would make little difference. The passengers might interfere with the unloading process, but the bridge was accessible only to authorized officers.

  The unloading process was mostly automatic, and could be executed from the engineering deck. Olson shut down the engines and Chief Engineer Kyra Gleeson began to jettison the containers, one by one. Crew on the cargo deck verified that each container had cleared the ship’s hull before the next one was jettisoned. Meanwhile, the Cho-ta’an ships, still accelerating at one point five gees, gained rapidly.

  Halfway into the process, Jason began to wonder if they had cut it too close, but the second half went more smoothly. Now several hundred tons lighter, Freedom re-engaged her engines. The Cho-ta’an had closed within a million kilometers by the time she rocketed away at one point six gees. The tension on the bridge dissolved into relief as Freedom pulled away from the enemy ships.

  A moment later, Freedom emptied her railguns into the jettisoned cargo, followed by all of her missiles. Rear-facing cameras caught a fireworks show as dozens of cargo containers were blasted to smithereens. This was followed a minute later by an encore as the debris tore through the eleven Cho-ta’an ships on Freedom’s tail.

  This is it, thought Jason. We’re unarmed and maxed out on acceleration. If any Cho-ta’an ships are left and they want to press their advantage, we’re done for. The Cho-ta’an weren’t built for hard acceleration, but they could tolerate it for a while in a pinch. Chot-ta’an interceptors topped out at over two gees.

  “Status report, Ms. Schwartz.”

  “Hang on, sir. Still a lot of debris in the way, and those interceptors are hard to see. Looks like… zero bogeys still on our tail. Confirmed, sir. All enemy vessels destroyed.”

  The bridge crew erupted in cheers.

  “Taken out by our fucking luggage,” Creed muttered. “Sorry, sir.”

  Jason laughed. “Well said, Mr. Creed. We’ll take our victories where we can.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “It’s a bit of an overstatement to say that time is an illusion, sir,” Haas said. “It just isn’t quite as fundamental to reality as we intuitively think it is. Do you remember those old Dirk Redwing serials, from before the first hyperspace gate was discovered?”

  “I’m familiar with them, yes,” replied the admiral.

  “I found pirated copies on G-Net when I was a kid. Dirk Redwing was always fighting the minions of Emperor Ximri of the Prylaxian Empire. The conceit of the show was that the viewer was watching everything through an extremely powerful telescope pointed at another galaxy. Every episode would start with a far-off shot through a sort of circular aperture, like you were watching bacteria through a microscope. The narrator, Doctor Chronos, would give you some background information, and then it would zoom in to the action. Pretty silly stuff, but I couldn’t get enough. I must have watched every episode at least five times. But then my older brother Cillian ruined it for me by telling me that light from another galaxy would take tens of thousands of years to reach us, so if there had ever been an Emperor Ximri, he’d been dead for millennia.

  “This bothered me more than I cared to admit, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. We knew about the hyperspace gates at this point, of course, so first I tried arguing that maybe Doctor Chronos’s telescope was a sort of hyperspace viewer. But Cillian retorted that the show had been produced before anyone knew about hyperspace gates, and in any case it was very clear from the show’s introduction that it was just a very powerful telescope.

  “So I started investigating the physics of light, to see if there was some kind of loophole that would allow someone to see what was currently going on in a distant galaxy, without resorting to hyperspace. What I found was at first disheartening: the speed of light was a hard limit. No information could travel faster than 300,000 kilometers per second. Anything that could be observed in a distant galaxy—without folding space—had happened tens of thousands of years ago.

  “But I also learned that because of general relativity, there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity. Whether two events are simultaneous depends on the frame of reference of the observer. And if that’s true, then why couldn’t Doctor Chronos’s telescope be located in a place where events in Dirk Redwing’s galaxy and events on Earth happened at the same time?

  “I didn’t fully understand what I was asking, but this question was enough to shut Cillian up. By this time, I had lost interest in Dirk Redwing anyway, but my interest in general relativity had been piqued. I continued researching, and eventually came to the conclusion that I’d been more-or-less correct: because no information can travel faster than light, the speed of light is essentially the limit at which the principle of causality can work. Causality is the bridge between the past and the future. In other words, there is no meaningful way to say that event E happened if there is no possible way for E to affect anything in the future.

  “Imagine a biologist looking at bacteria on a slide through a microscope. The biologist might say to her assistant, ‘At this moment, one bacterium is moving toward another from the left side of the slide to the right.’ In the same way, Doctor Chronos, looking through his super-telescope, might say, ‘At this moment, Emperor Ximri of the Prylaxian Empire is walking across his throne room on planet Grobok-8.’ In reality, Emperor Ximri may have died ten thousand years earlier, but what does that mean? No information could reach Doctor Chronos faster than light could travel, so there was no way anyone on Doctor Chronos’s planet could know about Ximri’s death or any other event in planet Grobok-8’
s ‘future.’ For any possible practical meaning of the term, Ximri is walking across his throne room now, in the same way that the bacterium is moving across the slide now.”

  “You’re saying that what we call the ‘present’ is not actually a straight line that separates the past and the future, but more like a wave that propagates across the universe at the speed of light.”

  “Exactly, sir!”

  “But then how does hyperspace travel fit in? Someone traveling through a hyperspace gate from Growbot—”

  “Grobok-8, sir.”

  “Someone traveling through a hyperspace gate from Grobok-8 would be able to foretell Emperor Ximri’s death and the fall of the Prylaxian Empire before Doctor Chronos could observe it through his telescope. How can that be, if events on Grobok-8 are happening the moment Doctor Chronos observes them?”

  “One way to look at it is that the traveler has come to Doctor Chronos from the future.”

  “You’re hedging, Haas. Is Doctor Chronos’s visitor a time traveler or not?”

  “As with anything involving time, sir, it’s a matter of perspective. Events in the visitor’s past are in Doctor Chronos’s future. And the reverse is also true. Suppose Emperor Ximri has his own super-telescope on planet Grobok-8, which has secretly been aimed at Doctor Chronos this whole time. Emperor Ximri doesn’t like being watched, and he sends an assassin through a hyperspace gate to kill Doctor Chronos. The assassin succeeds and returns through the hyperspace gate to report his success to Emperor Ximri on Grobok-8. Emperor Ximri is elated, but when he looks through his super-telescope, he still sees Doctor Chronos staring back at him, because the light from Doctor Chronos’s planet will take another ten thousand years to reach him. In effect, the assassin traveled ten thousand years into the past to kill Doctor Chronos.”