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

by Robert Kroese

  “In short, our best chance at survival, from a purely genetic standpoint, is to maintain a completely female population for as long as possible. As soon as we introduce males, genetic diversity declines rapidly. If we knew roughly how long it’s going to take for Freedom to reach its destination, we could plan accordingly, transitioning back to a balanced population a few generations before we arrive. But if we have no idea where we’re going, we have little choice but to maintain a population that’s close to one hundred percent female.”

  “I noticed you’ve moved from theoretical observations to policy suggestions.”

  Foley smiled tiredly. “I’m doing my best to remain neutral, but there’s a point at which ethics give way to brute reality. The fact is, if we want this branch of humanity to survive, we have no choice.”

  “Meaning selective abortion. Or infanticide.”

  “I think we can avoid the latter. We have blood tests that can safely and accurately determine gender at six weeks.”

  “And if the fetus is male, it gets aborted.”

  “I understand it’s distasteful, Captain, but without eliminating males from the population for several generations, our mission cannot succeed.”

  “Maybe it should fail, in that case.”

  “Don’t let sentiment cloud your judgment, Captain. Many of the civilizations on which ours is based practiced infanticide. The Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the Japanese….”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “Perhaps not, but necessity doesn’t always recognize ethical distinctions. I will also note that you had no qualms about lying to a group of young women in order to get them aboard a ship so that they could serve as surrogate mothers.”

  “I don’t recall being asked about my qualms,” Jason said irritably. “In any case, the situations are not comparable. Yes, we manipulated those girls, but they and their families knew what they were volunteering for. And what we did was in service of promoting life, not ending it.”

  “As is this,” Foley said. “Tell me, Captain. Did you object this strenuously when the IDL imposed mandatory military service on the populations of several planets in exchange for protection from the Cho-ta’an?”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “No? You mean because we’re talking about six-week-old fetuses being painlessly aborted rather than fully developed young men and women being sent to die in a losing war against the Cho-ta’an?”

  “You would prefer we just handed those planets over to the enemy?”

  “Why not? What difference did it make in the end?”

  “Humans fight!” Jason snapped. “Men fight.”

  “There are different ways of fighting, Captain. They all require sacrifice. Look, I don’t like this any more than you do. I’m not going to let you make me into the bad guy here. You’re in charge of this ship and this mission. I can’t make you do anything. All I’m doing is giving you information. If humanity is to survive, this is what must be done.”

  *****

  After that conversation, Jason Huiskamp and Lauren Foley did not speak for three weeks. Freedom had halted her outbound motion and begun the slow journey back toward the Sol system. It would be another three weeks before she attained orbit over Earth. Foley continued to forward recommendations from the committee as well as refinements to her own plan, but the main points remained the same: they would need to somehow acquire about thirty young women and sperm samples from at least two hundred, and preferably more like five hundred, men. Freedom would launch in search of a suitable planet for colonizing, with a strict regime in place to control reproduction over the next twenty generations. Several times Jason came close to tossing out the whole plan and taking his chances on becoming Emperor Jason I of Earth. But rewriting history would likely unleash horrors far worse than enforcement of selective abortion among a small group of women for a few generations. And his father’s words continued to haunt him: What’s done is done. No, he couldn’t rewrite history. He would have to make his own mistakes and hope history forgave him. Out, damned spot!

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Akiva returned to Beneberak the next day with orders to pronounce Simon bar Kochba the moschiach. The exhortation was unnecessary; now that Akiva had seen the sign and heard the heralds speak the name, nothing could prevent him from spreading the word. Every Jew in Judaea and beyond would know the truth: Simon bar Kochba was the long-awaited savior of Israel, and the liberation of Judaea was at hand.

  Such was Akiva’s reputation as a scholar and man of God that his conversion was treated as something of a miracle in itself. Those of Akiva’s students who had not already joined the cause were won over, and as word spread through the rabbinic community in Judaea, many set their reservations aside in deference to Akiva. Merchants and shopkeepers, seeing which way the wind was blowing, became devoted rebels. In a matter of weeks, the atmosphere of Judaea was transformed: where there had been a smoldering blaze, there was now a raging inferno.

  Jewish victories over the Romans followed. Roman forts were overrun across Judaea, and ambushes were so frequent now that the Romans no longer traveled in groups of fewer than a hundred men. The war expanded to Samaria as the locals began to believe that the Jews might succeed after all. Rumblings of revolt reached Judaea from Arabia and Cyprus. There were rumors that Simon bar Kochba would soon take Yerusalem. Israel would win her freedom, and in doing so she would bring the downfall of the Roman Empire.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “All right,” said Jason. “Assuming I implement this plan, how do we go about it?”

  “I’m a geneticist, Captain,” Lauren Foley replied. “Corralling people onto a spaceship is your area of expertise.” The two spoke over a table in a small conference room in the crew area.

  “My expertise, such as it is, doesn’t kick in until they are on the ship. I’m asking for your help.”

  “Fair enough. I will do what I can.”

  “We’ll put down somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. How do we get fifty women on board?”

  “I assume you don’t want to do it the way it was done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?”

  “If at all possible, we want them to board the ship willingly.”

  “For a person to do something of their own free will, they must understand the choice they are making. Do you think you can explain to a preliterate African the concept of a five-hundred-year voyage in a spaceship?”

  “Therein lies the problem.”

  “That’s not the biggest problem you face. The real question is: how do you get five hundred men to give you a sperm sample? Don’t laugh; it’s a trickier problem than you might think. Most cultures have moral strictures against men spilling their seed.”

  “My God,” said Jason. “I can’t believe I volunteered for this job.”

  “People will go to extreme measures to ensure the future of their kind. If we can get them to understand this is a matter of survival, we can get buy-in.”

  “You mean we can get them to surrender fifty women of prime child-bearing age, as well as get five hundred men to… give us samples. I’m skeptical.”

  “We did it once.”

  “With an educated populace who understood the threat of the Cho-ta’an.”

  “Education doesn’t matter much in matters of survival,” Foley said. “And all cultures understand the idea of an existential threat. We just need to connect it to their situation. That shouldn’t be difficult; pre-agricultural peoples constantly faced the threat of mass death by starvation or conquest by another tribe.”

  “You’re suggesting that we convince a group of people that this is their only chance of survival.”

  “Or find a tribe that really is on the verge of extinction.”

  “How the hell do we do that? We don’t have two weeks to spend in orbit trying to make sense of the power dynamics of competing African tribes.”

  “Agreed. Our priority needs to be getting on the ground and finding some
food. Then we can worry about our other goals: acquiring a diverse supply of human genetic material and means for long-term food production.”

  “Can we do all three from a single landing site? I don’t know how many takeoffs from Earth this ship can handle,” Jason said. “It wasn’t designed to do it at all.”

  “Not likely, unless you’re prepared to travel a hundred kilometers or more from the landing site. Our goals are somewhat in conflict with each other. For human genetic diversity, our best bet is sub-Saharan Africa. But sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t have agriculture yet, which means no domesticated crops or animals. That’s going to make it very difficult to find species suitable for farming.

  “Additionally, even if our agricultural endeavors are wildly successful, we’re not even going to be close to self-sufficient for at least five years. So figure we need food for two hundred people to last seven years. The only place to get that much food is a large city. We also need to acquire seeds or root stock for at least forty different species as plants, as well as breeding stock for several animal species. Again, unless you want to visit twenty different farms, that means going to a city. But there aren’t any cities in sub-Saharan Africa.”

  “What about cities in northern Africa? Tripoli, Cairo, or Alexandria?”

  Foley nodded. “Somewhat less genetic variation than in sub-Saharan Africa, but probably enough for our purposes. Those cities are on the trade routes connecting Europe and the Middle East, so we should be able to find a wide range of plant and animal species. The problem, of course, is that a bunch of strangely dressed foreigners trying to buy several tons of food, seeds, and animals are going to draw a lot of attention. Even if we can land Freedom far enough away that it doesn’t cause widespread panic, we run the risk of breaking history.”

  “Requesting sperm samples from several hundred men is unlikely to allay concerns,” Jason added. “To say nothing of absconding with fifty young women.”

  “So you see the problem. My suggestion would be to locate a relatively isolated city. Somewhere we could land nearby without drawing attention. Send your crew into town to buy what we need and get out before the locals can get organized and come after us with pitchforks. Load up our cargo and take off. Get into orbit and take our time trying to find an isolated tribe that can provide us with the colonists and human genetic material we need.”

  “Two separate landings,” Jason said. “It’s risky.”

  “Riskier than kidnapping fifty young women from Cairo?”

  “I suppose not. Very well. Put the committee to work finding cities that are good candidates for a resupply stop.”

  *****

  The committee selected Damascus, Syria as the optimal place to acquire food and agricultural supplies. It was large enough to supply the quantities they would require, and cosmopolitan enough that a group of strangely dressed foreigners might not draw a great deal of attention. Because it was located in the middle of the Fertile Crescent, it would be a market hub for many different varieties of domesticated plants and animals. And as it was surrounded by uninhabited desert, Freedom could land a few kilometers away without risk of alarming the residents of other towns nearby. It was part of the Roman Empire at this time, but conveniently (according to the historical record) the troops normally stationed there had been summoned to Judaea, to the south, to help put down a rebellion there. Whatever trouble the crew might encounter in Damascus, at least they didn’t have to worry about facing down a Roman legion.

  Freedom set down on a desert plateau about twelve kilometers southeast of Damascus. They landed just after dawn, when the light of the sun would blind the people of Damascus to their approach. It was hoped the bustle of the city would cover the sound of Freedom’s thrusters, which produced over one hundred thirty decibels. The landing site was within the area that would one day be occupied by Damascus International Airport; Devin Olson quipped that they only missed the runway by nineteen hundred years.

  It was just as well: Freedom’s thrusters would turn asphalt into vapor. As it was, the locals would likely puzzle over the vast areas of glazed rock after Freedom was gone—assuming they didn’t arrive while she was still on the ground. As far as they could tell from the historical record and photos taken during their approach, there were only a few, very small villages in the vicinity. Jason took it as a given that the locals would come to investigate the landing site. Freedom was nearly three hundred meters long, and the ground was flat for nearly a kilometer in every direction. Anyone who had seen Freedom coming down and decided to investigate couldn’t help but find her.

  If it were only a few shepherds, that wouldn’t be a problem: The crew was armed, and the locals would have a hell of a time breaking through the shielded hull with rocks or shepherds’ crooks. What Jason wanted to avoid was drawing the attention of the authorities. The Romans in particular were meticulous record-keepers, and there were undoubtedly still several hundred Roman soldiers in town. If a Roman cohort had found a gigantic spaceship in the Arabian Desert in 134 A.D., the encounter would have been recorded. No such record had been found, and Jason had by now thoroughly internalized the principle that history would reject paradoxes. Perhaps it would do this by causing Freedom’s reactor to explode, neatly erasing all evidence of her arrival. Given the strain they had already put on the reactor, this was a likely outcome in any case, and Jason wasn’t eager to tempt fate.

  They spent an anxious hour after Freedom’s landing waiting for the heat generated by her thrusters to dissipate enough to allow the resupply team to exit the ship. The team was made up of Jason, Olson and Creed. It was risky for three bridge crew members to leave the ship, but if the expedition failed, they weren’t going anywhere anyway. Mika Schwartz protested that she should be allowed to go (she outranked the young Creed), but their best bet was to pose as representatives of the government of some distant land that was experiencing a famine and needed desperately to stock up on food; Jason argued that including a woman in such an expedition would only raise suspicion.

  Not that they weren’t already going to raise suspicion: they resembled no known ethnicity and spoke a language that wouldn’t exist even in its most primitive form for over another four hundred years. Devin Olson, tall and blond, would stick out like a sore thumb. The colonists had been put to work over the past two weeks creating reasonably convincing replicas of the local clothing, but all the fabric they had to work with incorporated synthetic fibers that were unknown in the second century. Jason had made the crew learn a few hundred words of ancient Latin, on the basis that it was the language of the legal authorities throughout the region, as well as being more accessible than ancient Arabic, but this was barely enough to speak a few simple sentences, such as “What is the price of five hundred bushels of wheat?” and “I am sorry, I did not mean to offend.” None of them could speak a word of Greek, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, or any of the other languages of the region, which would be strange for a group sent to Damascus to engage in commercial endeavors. In short, nothing about the expedition would stand up to any serious scrutiny.

  At last the hull and the ground beneath the ship cooled enough that the team could safely exit Freedom. Even so, it felt like a furnace outside, and the temperature did not drop significantly as they moved away from the ship. Their wrist comms—hidden underneath their robes—said the ambient temperature was forty-four degrees Celsius—hot enough to fry an egg on the rocks. It was only ten a.m.

  “Jesus, Captain,” said Olson. “I’m not sure we can make it twelve klicks in this heat. I’m going to burn like an ant under a magnifying glass. Would it be better to travel at night?”

  Creed, who was built more slightly than Olson and didn’t have the navigator’s fair complexion, nevertheless nodded in sympathy.

  “The clock started ticking on this mission the moment we entered the atmosphere,” the Captain said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “You can bet that somebody saw us touch down, and they’re on their way here right now. With any luck, it wil
l just be a few illiterate peasants, but eventually word will get to the authorities. If that happens, things will get real sticky, real fast. Let’s move.”

  Jason strode across the parched ground toward the hills in the distance beyond which lay the ancient city of Damascus. Creed and Olson followed. He hoped he projected more confidence than he felt. Each of them carried a makeshift faux-leather bag that held about two liters of water. In this heat, they’d go through a liter an hour each, easily, and it was only going to get hotter. If they’d been able to take plastic jugs—to say nothing of wheeled carts or synthetic fiber backpacks—they could have carried a lot more, but such artifacts would draw unwanted attention. They carried little more than water, a few small weapons that could be hidden under their robes, and about twenty kilos of silver and gold ingots. This represented about half of their store of precious metals, which had been brought aboard Freedom in case the colonists needed to trade with the natives of an already-inhabited planet. With this, they hoped to buy enough food to last two hundred people seven years. They would then have to transport it to the ship before the authorities found it. If they failed, they would die, along with everyone still aboard Freedom. And some two thousand years later, humanity would be exterminated by the Cho-ta’an.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Aziz ibn Batnaya sat on a rug before a small wooden table, staring out his window. In the dim predawn light, the neighbor woman, Layah, beat her rugs, and the dust wafted over the remains of Aziz’s breakfast. Layah, not a small woman, was already sweating. It would be hot today, and the industrious people of the city were already making the most of the light. Carts clattered across streets of packed earth, women sang while doing household chores, and in the distance vendors hawked their wares. Aziz, though, had more important matters on his mind. He was a man ahead of his time, and like most such men, he was regarded as a fool by many.