The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  After locating Ivar, who stood alone against the wall of the first level of the pit, O’Brien climbed down the ladder and walked over to him.

  “Any news from down below?” O’Brien shouted.

  Ivar blinked at him, at first not seeming to understand. He’d been staring in a half-conscious daze, clearly exhausted.

  “Nothing new,” he said at last.

  That was good news. Nothing new meant no reports of additional fatalities. It was only a matter of time, though. Despite tight rationing, the men had used the last of their water two days ago. If they didn’t reach the men soon, more would die.

  Einar shut down the digger about two hours later, worried that he was getting too close to the trapped men. He’d hit a layer of rich black coal, which meant he couldn’t be far from the mine. For a few minutes they all sat as quietly as they could, listening for any sign of life down below, but their ears wear ringing so badly that nobody could be certain what they were hearing. Finally someone went and fetched a young man who was part of the daisy chain to come and listen. The sky had clouded over, and while they waited, it began to rain. The man from the mine lay down and pressed his ear to the rubble, but he couldn’t hear anything but the patter of raindrops. O’Brien picked up a shove and ordered every man, including those on daisy chain duty, to start digging.

  O’Brien set an alarm on his cuff to go off every twenty minutes. Whenever it chimed, he would order everyone to stop digging, be completely quiet and listen. The rain continued to intensify, making it that much harder to hear, and now O’Brien began to worry about flooding on top of everything else.

  The gray sky was lightening in the east when they first heard the faint sound of a man’s voice. No one could make out what he was saying, but it gave them a general direction to aim for. They moved so they were centered on the area where the voice seemed to be coming from, and O’Brien set his alarm for ten minutes. Thirty minutes later, one of the men stepped in a puddle and found himself sinking to his crotch in the mud. He gave a shout and dropped his shovel, and three of his comrades extracted him from the muck, one of them nearly sliding into the cavity below in the process. When they’d gotten clear, they stood watching rainwater run in rivulets down the sides of a crater to a hole about six inches in diameter, where it disappeared into the blackness. Voices shouted faintly from below.

  O’Brien ordered everyone away from the area and then removed one of the work lights from a nearby pole and shined it into the hole. He could see nothing but a large mound of coal and gravel, some twenty feet below. Hoarse cries for help continued to come from somewhere below, but he could see no movement.

  “We’re trying to get you out,” O’Brien called down the hole. “I need you to back as far away from the sound of my voice as you can.”

  For a moment, there was no sound but the gentle hiss of the rain.

  “Mister O’Brien?” came a faint voice at last.

  “Yes, this is O’Brien.”

  Several men spoke at once, their words an incoherent jumble, but the change in tone was unmissable and its meaning unmistakable: if O’Brien is here, perhaps not all is lost. The regard in which these men held him pierced his heart like a knife. This was the downside of being a demigod from beyond the stars: men expected you to perform miracles.

  Finding himself unable to speak, O’Brien backed away from the hole. It was probably just as well. The men knew he was here, and they knew what to do. Anything he said now would only erode their impression of him as a superhuman entity. He turned and walked away, rejoining Ivar and Einar at the perimeter of the hole. The rest of the men had already climbed the ladder out of the pit.

  O’Brien conferred with the two men, relating what he had seen. As far as he could tell, they were right on top of the epicenter of the cave-in, which was both good news and bad: on one hand, they had avoided digging directly into the chamber where the men were trapped, averting another cave-in. On the other hand, they were now standing on top of a large void that had been created when the cave-in occurred. O’Brien had imagined that once they got a sense for where the men were trapped, they could remove the bulk of the remaining debris with the steam shovel, but he now saw that was impossible. Not only was the cave-in farther down than they’d estimated; the void in the earth made using the steam shovel far too dangerous.

  Digging by hand was hardly preferable, however: after nearly losing a man to the abyss, the miners weren’t eager to get back to using their shovels. Even if they miraculously managed to widen the hole enough to get a man through without losing anyone else, they still had the problem of the pile of rubble below to deal with. There was no way to remove the rubble with shovels. Perhaps they could rig up a wooden derrick with buckets on pulleys, but it would take far too long. And if they were going to go to the trouble of building a derrick, there was a more obvious solution. O’Brien didn’t like it, but it was the only way.

  “Einar, get Sturi and get started digging out the corners of the pit on the south side, from there to there,” O’Brien said, indicating the area with his hand. “I want the base of the bowl as wide and flat as you can make it. Over there, we need a ramp for the digger. Ivar, put everyone else to work hauling lumber. I need every timber and beam you can spare. Nuts, bolts and nails too. Take them from the mine supports and railroad if you need to.”

  “What are we doing?” Einar asked, looking around in bewilderment.

  “We need to build a platform for the digger. Something to spread out its weight over as much area as possible.”

  “You want to bring the digger down here?”

  “It’s the only way to get the rubble out of there,” O’Brien said.

  “There isn’t enough room,” said Einar. “If I widen the pit too much in this rain, the sides are going to collapse.”

  “Maybe we can rig something up with pulleys…” Ivar started, but O’Brien shook his head, having already dismissed this option.

  “Too slow,” O’Brien said. “With any luck, some of that rainwater will get to those men, giving them some relief from their thirst, but if it keeps up, they’re going to drown.” This unfortunate side effect of their efforts had already become apparent: the pit was channeling all the rainwater directly into the slowly-widening chasm. The rain was little more than a drizzle at this point, but O’Brien estimated at least a liter a minute was going down the hole. If the drizzle turned to a downpour, it would quickly turn into a raging torrent. And the water would only flow faster as the ground on the tiers above became saturated. “We’ve got four hours to get a platform built and get the digger on top of it,” O’Brien said, trying to sound confident in his estimate. In reality, he hadn’t a clue how long it would take for the chamber to flood. Depending on the rain and how the tunnel was configured, it might be an hour or it might be days.

  “Mister O’Brien,” Ivar pleaded, “Bringing the digger down here… it’s not safe. The ground will cave in. We’ll lose all those men, and probably several more, not to mention the digger. There has to be another way.”

  “There is no other way,” O’Brien snapped. “We need to get that machine down here, and the sooner we do it, the better chance we have of saving those men. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ivar said. The others mumbled their assent as well.

  “Good. Get to work. I’ll start sketching the platform.” O’Brien began walking toward the ladder.

  “Should someone tell them what we’re doing?” Einar asked.

  O’Brien paused a moment but then shook his head. “No one gets near that hole,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. They know we’re working on getting them out. Everybody get to work.”

  The two hesitated, but then Ivar turned and began walking toward the ladder. Einar followed, and O’Brien breathed a silent sigh of relief. He’d done his best to feign confidence in his plan, but he had only the vaguest notion of its feasibility. He didn’t know whether they could build the platform in time, whether they’d be able to build a plat
form with enough rigidity to spread the weight, nor whether there was enough surface area to spread the weight of the digger across. On top of all that uncertainty, he didn’t know how long it would be before the chamber flooded. He told himself it was the only option left to them, but that was little consolation: he’d gotten them into this mess by using the steam shovel. If he hadn’t shown up, the miners might have dug their trapped compatriots out by hand by this time. Not only had he wrecked their only producing coal mine; he’d probably sealed the deaths of eleven men—maybe more by the time the day was through.

  Chapter Four

  O’Brien shook off the self-doubt, forcing himself to focus on the problem at hand—something he’d found himself doing frequently in the twenty-two years he’d been on Earth. He climbed up the ladder after Einar and made his way to the camp buildings. The sun had arisen somewhere beyond a thick veil of slate gray clouds, and the rain continued to fall steadily, coalescing in rivulets that meandered toward the trapped men. O’Brien located a pencil and some sheets of paper and ensconced himself in a shed, where he spent the next hour sketching a rough diagram for a platform that he hoped would be capable of bearing the weight of the steam shovel.

  The design was simple: long horizontal beams would be constructed by overlapping and bolting together the timbers used for reinforcing passages in the mine. Three of these beams would be stacked vertically, with a gap of eight inches between them, to create a joist, and scrap lumber would be nailed to the sides for shear support. The joists would be placed on the ground, two feet apart, and gravel would be used to backfill beneath them to make the top of the joists as close to level as possible. Blocking would be added between the boards for stability, and then planks would be laid across the tops of the joists and nailed into place. It was far from ideal, from an engineering perspective, but it was the best O’Brien could do with limited time, materials and tools. He returned to the pit to find that Einar had dug it out on the south side to give him a relatively flat surface about thirty feet square and had moved on to digging out the ramp. O’Brien had hoped for a somewhat larger area to work with, but in reality his makeshift platform was probably going to bow so much under the weight of the steam shovel that extending it another ten feet probably wouldn’t make much difference.

  Several dozen timbers had already been piled on the ground on the second tier of the pit, a few feet from the edge of the bowl. O’Brien showed his diagram to Ivar, who quickly grasped what he was after and ordered six of the men to start building. As simple as his design was, it proved difficult to accomplish in practice, due to the crookedness of the beam and their huge variance in the size. In the end, he had to modify the joists so they were two beams with a gap of variable size, rather than three beams sandwiched together. The boards nailed to the sides of the joists would have to provide enough support to keep them from sagging.

  The amount of blocking required to keep the joists from folding toward the perpendicular was another problem. They had plenty of lumber but only two handsaws, and it quickly became apparent that measuring, sawing and affixing all the blocks they needed would take several hours. In the end, O’Brien reduced the amount of blocking by three quarters and had the men fill the spaces between the joists with earth and gravel to bolster them. They had no shortage of planking for the deck, as Ivar had ordered the men to tear the clapboards off the walls of the building in which the digger had been housed. These were hammered down with what few nails they had left, and then the pit was evacuated. O’Brien had no idea whether the ramshackle platform would hold the twenty plus tons of the digger, but it was going to have to do. He volunteered to operate the digger himself, reasoning that if the platform collapsed beneath him, he’d at least die along with the men he’d failed to rescue. Reyes would frown on that decision, he knew, but Reyes wasn’t here.

  He would have preferred to take the risk alone, but Dag, his fireman, was already at work stoking the furnace of the digger. O’Brien climbed aboard, gave him a silent nod, and got into the driver’s seat. He engaged the throttle and the machine roared to life. He maneuvered it to the rough ramp Einar had dug and drove down into the pit. He held his breath as the front of the treads hit the platform, but he didn’t dare slow down until the steam shovel was parked squarely on the wooden surface. It held, and he let out a relieved sigh.

  He maneuvered the bucket toward the chasm and began gingerly scraping away at the mud, depositing it bit by bit toward the side of the pit. Some of the earth fell into the pit, but he avoided triggering any major collapses. With every movement of the arm, he imagined he could feel the makeshift platform creaking and buckling beneath him, but it held. Soon the hole had been widened to a diameter of ten feet, and he could see enough of the debris pile to determine where to focus his efforts. He rotated the body of the digger to the right and began removing earth closer to where the men were trapped. Soon he could see the where the edge of the mound spilled into the chamber. He caught sight of something moving down below: someone was waving a rag tied to the end of a wooden pole. Judging that the opening was big enough for a man to get through, O’Brien shut down the engine.

  He climbed down, intending to shout instructions to Ivar, but the foreman was already climbing down toward him, carrying a coiled-up rope over one shoulder. Two other men were behind him. Ivar motioned toward the bucket, and O’Brien nodded and climbed back into the driver’s seat. O’Brien lowered the bucket to a few inches off the ground, and Ivar threw one end of it over the bucket and tied it in a slip-knot. Then he walked to the edge of the chasm and tossed the rest of the rope so that it landed on the debris pile and slid down toward the waving flag.

  The flag disappeared, and a few seconds later the rope went taut. Ivar, standing at the edge of the platform, gave O’Brien a thumbs-up. O’Brien waited another five seconds to be sure and then began to move the bucket slowly upwards and back as far as it would go. As he did so, the body of a man came into view, clutching the rope. It dragged the man up the pile of debris close enough that the men on the platform could pull him the rest of the way up. Once on the platform, the man was helped up the ramp. He was shaking, exhausted and covered from head to toe in mud and coal dust, but he was alive. O’Brien lowered the bucket and Ivar tossed end of the rope back down.

  Ten men came out of the hole; one had succumbed to injuries a few hours earlier. Altogether, four men had perished in the collapse. When the last man had been pulled onto the platform, O’Brien shut down the digger and slouched forward, burying his face in his hands. He broke into tears.

  When he had composed himself, he wiped his face with his filthy shirt and climbed down onto the platform. Trembling and barely able to stand, his ears ringing from the noise of the engine, he stood for some time, leaning against the digger’s track. The rain had stopped and the afternoon sun was peering out from behind a cloud. The air was fresh and clean, and he took several deep breaths, forcing himself not to think of the four corpses who would remain interred in the black tomb below. It worked, O’Brien thought. We did it. And then he laughed, thinking of what qualified as a major accomplishment after twenty-two years on Earth. They were supposed to be building a spaceship, and here he was, rejoicing over losing only four men in a coalmine accident. And now the coalmine had been rendered unusable, setting their project back months.

  Despite this, O’Brien found himself in a cheery mood, buoyed by a rush of endorphins that had hit him when men began to emerge from the mine. Dag and the others had already returned to the camp, and O’Brien knew his exhaustion would catch up to him soon, but for now he was glad to have a moment alone to relish their success—his success. It had been his idea to use the digger, and it had paid off. For someone who had never thought of himself as a leader or particularly good under pressure, he’d done a damned good job of faking it. He’d had his doubts—still had them, if he were honest: if they’d kept digging by hand, they might have gotten the fourth man out in time, and they would have salvaged the mine. But there was
no way to know for certain, and despite a few complications, the rescue had gone better than he dared imagine. There would be hell to pay when he got back to Höfn, but he was convinced he’d done the right thing. He’d pulled out all the stops to save the men, and the miners had responded to his determination by redoubling their efforts. In the end, it was that sort of loyalty and dedication, more than coal production numbers, that was going to determine the success or failure of the Iron Dragon. Men who could keep their heads and pull together under circumstances like these could accomplish anything.

  As O’Brien stood leaning against the digger and enjoying the warm sunshine and cool, crisp air, he realized he was not alone. A man was standing on the far rim of the pit, looking down at him. The man was too distant for O’Brien to make out his face, but the man’s drab wool robe made it clear he was no miner. In his left hand was a walking stick, and sunlight glinted off the man’s bald head. He stood unmoving at the edge of the pit, observing O’Brien with stoic interest. And suddenly O’Brien became uncomfortably aware of the twenty-ton piece of machinery he was leaning against. He wondered how long the man had been watching. Too long, that was certain.

  O’Brien beckoned to the man, but it was too late: the priest had turned away. A moment later, the man was gone. His good mood shattered, O’Brien trudged up the ramp toward the camp.

  Chapter Five