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

by Robert Kroese

  “Aye, sir,” Darmawan mumbled, and he made his way sheepishly to the elevator.

  Jason turned and walked toward Lauren Foley, stopping just in front of her.

  “Thank God,” Foley said. “I don’t know why she got so worked up about—”

  “I apologize for underestimating your intelligence, Dr. Foley,” Jason said. “I ask that you don’t insult mine. On the off-chance that we survive the next six hours, I promise to be more forthcoming with information. All I ask in return is that you keep your people in line. I can’t promise a happy ending the next time you orchestrate a drama like this.” He handed her the knife and then turned and followed Hasan Darmawan to the elevator.

  *****

  Jason barely had time to get strapped in before Freedom’s nav system cut the engines and she was once again in freefall. For the next hour, it occasionally fired its lateral thrusters in response to pings from the gate. The thruster burns gradually grew shorter and less frequent and then stopped entirely. The nav system assured them that they were on target to meet the rendezvous point, but the margin of error was several times the diameter of the gate. Jason had ordered Olson to disable the “COLLISION IMMINENT” warning that insisted on reminding them of the nav system’s limitations.

  They sat in silence, strapped into their chairs, luxuriating in the relief of freefall despite the direness of their situation. Their console displays showed Freedom’s approach vectors, the distance to the gate, and the amount of time left until the rendezvous point. The seconds ticked by impossibly slowly, and Jason wondered for a moment if he were somehow experiencing the slowdown of time caused by their incredible velocity. It was a silly thought: time would pass more slowly for him relative to the gate, but of course the effect would not be noticeable to him on the ship. He found himself wondering how Freedom’s computers dealt with the discrepancy. If Freedom had to navigate to a particular point at a particular time, but time passed at a different rate on the ship than at the gate—

  And then, suddenly his console display read:

  Velocity relative to Chrylis gate: UNKNOWN

  Distance to Chrylis gate: UNKNOWN

  Time to rendezvous point: UNKOWN

  Current coordinates: UNKNOWN

  GST: xxx [waiting for sync]

  “Status, Mr. Olson!”

  “Um, I think we went through?”

  “You think?”

  “We went through the gate, sir. We must have. The rendezvous point is passed, and we don’t seem to be in the Chrylis system anymore.”

  “Where are we?”

  “The Sol system. I think. The nav system is still trying to figure it out.”

  “Any sign of Cho-ta’an?”

  “No, sir. There’s no sign of anything.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I mean… I’m not picking up any transmissions of any kind. No Cho-ta’an. No humans. No gate.”

  “The Sol gate isn’t broadcasting?”

  “The Sol gate is gone, sir. And there’s something else, sir. This is definitely the Sol system, but everything is in the wrong place.” He pointed to his display. “Jupiter. Saturn. Earth. Nothing is where it should be.”

  “Some temporal distortion wouldn’t be unexpected going through the gate at that speed,” Jason said. “Did we lose a few minutes?”

  Olson shook his head. “No, sir. We didn’t lose time. If what the nav system is telling me is accurate, we gained it.”

  “You mean we traveled backwards in time?”

  “It sure looks that way, sir.”

  “How far, Mr. Olson?”

  “Um. Two thousand ninety-three years, sir.”

  “Two thousand…! That would mean it’s…”

  “134 A.D., sir.”

  “Are you certain, Mr. Olson?”

  “I… no, sir. I can’t be certain of anything. But according to the nav system, there’s only one time in the past ten million years when the planets were in this configuration. And if you add in the constellations… well, either it’s May 16, 134 A.D. or somebody with a twisted sense of humor has hacked our systems.”

  Jason shook his head slowly, awed. “My God. We did it. The old man was right.” Creed and Schwartz sat speechless, taking in the information.

  “So it would seem, sir,” said Olson. “Congratulations, Captain. We outran the Cho-ta’an.”

  “What’s our heading?”

  “We’re headed straight for the sun, sir. At point three three light speed relative to the… well, where the gate should be. At this rate, we’ll hit it in one hundred thirty-four minutes.”

  Jason nodded, rubbing his chin with his thumb and forefinger. Other than Freedom arriving two thousand years before the Sol gate was constructed, everything was as expected: the gate had oriented them toward the sun, and their relative velocity had been maintained. Ordinarily ships coming through a gate would alter their velocity to rendezvous with a planet or space station as it came around the sun. Sometimes that meant slipping past the sun to the other side of the solar system, and sometimes, when the ship was traveling very fast, it meant sling-shotting around the sun before heading back out toward the destination. “Very fast” in these cases generally meant around a thousand kilometers per second. Freedom was traveling a hundred times that speed. Colliding with the sun wasn’t a concern—at this distance, Freedom could alter its trajectory enough to miss it. The problem was that she would then be heading out into deep space with minimal supplies and no way of returning to the Sol system for many weeks.

  “Begin deceleration as soon as possible, Mr. Olson.”

  “Aye, sir. I may have to cut it a little close.”

  “How close?”

  “A hundred thousand kilometers?”

  “Good Lord. I guess we’ll all be getting tans. Can our hull take it?”

  “We’ll still be going over point three light speed, so we’ll be that close only for a few seconds.”

  “Why so close?”

  “Going to try to use the sun’s gravity well to alter our trajectory enough to intersect the path of one of the outer planets to slow us a bit on our way out.”

  “Do you have any particular planet in mind, Mr. Olson?”

  “Not at this point, sir. I’ve got my hands full just trying to keep us in the solar system.”

  Chapter Thirty

  A thorough review of all the available evidence—the positions of the planets and stars, as well as the complete lack of any radio transmissions—confirmed Olson’s conclusion. Jason called a meeting with Creed, Olson, Schwartz and Gleeson to get their input, but none of them could come up with a better explanation. As far as any of them could tell, it was May 16, 134 A.D.

  Jason had been prepared for the possibility that Freedom would travel for a thousand years to reach a planet suitable for colonization. He had not been expecting to travel two thousand years in an instant. Andrea Luhman traveling back in time had never been more than a theoretical possibility, and he’d never really believed Freedom would outrun the Cho-ta’an and make it through the Chrylis gate unscathed. Faced with this new reality, he was unsure how to proceed. All he knew is that they needed to get to Earth.

  Freedom shot past the sun just over two hours after their arrival in the Sol system, as Mr. Olson had predicted. Jason made a general announcement that all passengers and crew should remain seated with restraints in place in case things got bumpy, but other than a brief increase in temperature, there was little indication inside the ship that they were flying within a few thousand kilometers of a gigantic ball of nuclear fusion. Olson kept the engines firing at near-maximum, decelerating at one point six gees all the way in. As they neared the sun, he changed Freedom’s orientation so that its thrusters would help keep her inside the sun’s gravity well as long as possible. The idea was to bend Freedom’s trajectory by a degree or two and use the pull of the sun’s powerful gravitational field to slow them as they headed back out toward the outskirts of the solar system. Olson ha
d determined that with a little luck, they could then attempt a similar trick with Jupiter, flying just behind her as she moved toward the perihelion of her orbit. Jupiter would lend a little of her momentum to Freedom, reducing the ship’s outward velocity.

  Gravity assists—or “slingshot maneuvers,” as they were often called—were complex operations that generally took days or even weeks to calculate. Because of Freedom’s insane velocity, Olson had to calculate their trajectory on the fly, changing their orientation or thrust slightly every few minutes to keep them from passing too close to the sun or arcing at an angle that would cause them to miss Jupiter by a million kilometers.

  After two hours of pulling out what was left of his wispy blond hair, Olson breathed a sigh of relief as Freedom began to pull away from the sun. “Five hours, twenty-one minutes until Jupiter gravity assist,” he said. “I’ll have to re-run the calculations, but I think I can get us close to Neptune. If I don’t have to use too much of our delta-v getting us aligned with Neptune’s orbit, I think we can slow enough to make use of Neptune’s gravity too.”

  Despite Olson’s optimistic assessment early on, it became clear as they neared Jupiter that they were still going far too fast for a true slingshot. A classic gravity assist involved getting close enough to a large body of mass for a long enough time to steal some of that body’s momentum, like a child running in a straight line that brought her within arm’s reach of a carousel. The child would jump on the carousel for a moment, borrowing some of the carousel’s momentum to alter her trajectory. The problem was that Freedom was moving so fast that she wouldn’t stay inside Jupiter’s gravity well long enough for it to make much of a difference. It was like the child was running so much faster than the carousel that she could only get a hold of it for an instant before her momentum tore her away.

  Five hours and twenty-one minutes after passing the sun, Freedom began its arc around Jupiter. To Olson’s credit, the gravity assist went as well as could be expected: Freedom was in the gas giant’s gravity well for less than two minutes, but this was enough to slow her a bit more and send her more-or-less in the direction of Neptune—or where Neptune would be in three days.

  Over the next three days, Olson kept Freedom’s rate of deceleration at one point six gees, occasionally altering her orientation in an attempt to creep up on Neptune as she raced around the sun. Neptune would be their last opportunity for a gravity assist; Pluto was currently on the opposite side of the sun, and in any case didn’t have enough mass to be of much help. If Freedom was moving too fast or didn’t time her intersection of Neptune’s orbit correctly, she would break free of Neptune’s gravity too soon and speed off into deep space, still traveling at nearly point two light speed. Traveling at that velocity and decelerating at one point six gees, it would take her forty-five days to arrest her movement out of the solar system, and the journey back to Earth would take even longer. Freedom had enough food on board to last the crew and colonists ninety days at most. Jason had ordered strict rationing while Freedom was still two days out from Jupiter, but if she missed her rendezvous with Neptune, some very difficult choices would have to be made.

  Fortunately, Neptune’s current position was nearly ideal for their purposes. With Olson running on caffeine and sugar, they managed to pass within three thousand kilometers of Neptune as it approached aphelion. Her thrusters oriented to move her in a wide arc around the planet, Freedom was able to remain within Neptune’s gravity well for nearly ten minutes, significantly reducing her outward velocity. She was still going way too fast, but at least a little of her momentum had been redirected laterally. After she broke free of Neptune’s gravity, the crew waited in breathless silence as Olson calculated how long it would take Freedom to return to Earth.

  “The bad news,” he said after a few minutes, “is that our outbound velocity is still point one eight light speed. We’re looking at forty days to arrest that. The good news is that Earth is nearing aphelion on this side of the sun, which means that over the next eight weeks it’s going to get a few million kilometers closer to us. My rough estimate is that we’ll be able to achieve Earth orbit in ninety days.”

  “Margin of error, Mr. Olson?”

  “A week either way. I’ll re-run the calculations in a few hours. First, though, I’m going to get some sleep.” Dark rings had appeared below Olson’s eyes, and his red-blond stubble was even more pronounced than usual.

  “Good work, Mr. Olson. I’ll see you in eight hours.”

  *****

  Olson ran his calculations again after his nap, and the result was slightly more agreeable. As near as he could estimate, they would reach Earth with at least five days to spare. They would be on minimum caloric intake for the next twelve weeks, but they would survive.

  Earth. It was hard to believe. Earth had been rendered uninhabitable by Cho-ta’an nukes in 2185. Jason had never been there, and had never intended to go. Now it was Freedom’s only possible destination. Without their cargo, they wouldn’t last six weeks in deep space. They needed, at minimum, to resupply with food and water. And then….

  One possibility was to land in some remote location on Earth and start their new colony there. Almost any place other than Europe or Asia would do: most of Earth in 134 A.D. had been populated by pre-literate, stone age people. With the spacemen’s advanced technology and comprehensive records of language, culture, history and geography, it would be a simple matter to coordinate with—or subdue—the local people. Intermingling and interbreeding would eventually occur. The colony would grow, and the spacemen’s knowledge would propagate. Eventually the colony would become the nexus of social and technological change on Earth. History would be rewritten. Perhaps the fall of the Roman Empire would be followed by the rise of a new, vastly more powerful empire, centered in Australia or South America. Humanity would leapfrog from the bronze age to the space age. They might begin building new interstellar spacecraft as early as the third or fourth century, and when they finally met the Cho-ta’an, they would be two thousand years ahead of them technologically.

  There were a couple of big problems with this idea. One was that there was no telling how the introduction of advanced technology would actually affect the course of history. Rather than launching the space age seventeen hundred years early, they might trigger a worldwide holocaust. Humanity had come very close to exterminating itself with nuclear weapons in the twentieth century; there was no telling what might happen if that technology fell into the hands of people who hadn’t even invented gunpowder. The horrors of the First World War had been due largely to the inability of leaders to imagine the consequences of technologies like explosive mines and mustard gas.

  The other problem was that it wasn’t clear that history could be changed at all. The idea that the hyperspace gates could theoretically be used to travel backwards through time was not a new one. Jason had read some of the scientific literature on the subject, and the consensus among those who believed that time travel was possible was that the past could not be changed. Much of the research on the subject, though, was conducted by an organization called the Jörmungandr Foundation, which seemed to have an agenda of some sort, although no one was quite certain what that agenda was. In any case, Jörmungandr’s scientists made a compelling case that although causation could theoretically run from the future to the past, events that were known to have occurred in the past could not be reversed.

  If that were the case, any attempt to jumpstart human civilization to get a head start on the Cho-ta’an would fail. There was no historical record of a massive spaceship landing on Earth in 134 A.D., so either it hadn’t happened or the spacemen had left no evidence of their arrival. The course of history would reject them like a body rejecting a transplanted organ. It was hard to imagine how such a rejection would occur; even if Freedom crashed in the middle of nowhere and were torn apart by ignorant natives, the sheer amount of high-quality refined metal in her hull would change history. A tribe of Incans or Mayans armed with ste
el swords and arrowheads would have left a mark. Perhaps Freedom would crash into the ocean or break apart in the atmosphere.

  Such a belief required a somewhat anthropomorphized view of history—history as an intelligent entity with definite ideas about what should and should not happen. Jason couldn’t quite make himself believe it, and yet…

  His father had transmitted two sentences in what was likely his last message to anyone. The first was a simple instruction: Go through the Chrylis gate to Sol at point three light speed. The second he had taken as a crude attempt to reconcile with his son, or perhaps simply to verify the genuineness of the message. But what if it was something else? What if his father was telling him not to try to change history?

  What’s done is done. It could be the motto of the Jörmungandr Foundation. Was that merely a coincidence? How many times had his father given that infuriating counsel to his son in the wake of some mistake or failure?

  “‘How now, my lord, why do you keep alone,

  Of sorriest fancies your companions making,

  Using those thoughts which should indeed have died

  With them they think on? Things without all remedy

  Should be without regard: what’s done, is done.’”

  It wasn’t until he was in college and read MacBeth for himself that he realized the full meaning of the quote: Lady MacBeth was telling her husband to stop obsessing over the murder of Duncan. Was his father aware of the context, or did he simply like the way it sounded? They hadn’t talked much after Jason left home, and somehow he never got a chance to ask.

  What’s done is done. It could mean anything, or nothing. Was it a shibboleth, an arbitrary code phrase—or a warning? If it were the latter, what was it based on? Did his father have some hard evidence that changing the past was impossible? Had he become an adherent to the Jörmungandr philosophy? That strained credulity.