The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  Two days later, O’Brien left again on the karve. He had intended to stay longer, but he wanted to get back to Höfn to warn Reyes not to dispatch any more cargo ships to Camp Yeager. At least two knars would already be on their way—more than enough to carry what little coal was ready for shipment. Thanks to the cave-in and the need to dig a new mine, no more would be forthcoming for some time. O’Brien had identified a site for the new mine, but Ivar and his men would have to start on it without him. The crew unloaded the food and other supplies they’d brought for the miners, loaded the karve with coal, and set sail.

  The voyage from Camp Yeager to Höfn went smoothly, thanks to steady winds and relatively smooth seas, and the karve sailed into the harbor at Höfn four days after embarking. The crew furled the sails and brought out the oars to row the last few hundred yards, O’Brien fidgeting nervously as the ship approached the shore. He wasn’t looking forward to explaining the situation at the mine to Reyes. He’d gone over the events a hundred times in his mind and was convinced he couldn’t have done anything differently, but the delay and loss of men was still very bad news. Without a ready supply of coal, much of the work in Iceland would soon screech to a halt.

  When the karve was less than a hundred yards from shore, the crew stowed the oars. One by one, the men leaped over the side into the waist-deep water, taking hold of the boat by the gunwales to guide it to shore. They were well-practiced at this task; the idea was to maintain as much momentum as possible so as to get the boat entirely onto the shore by the time it stopped moving. Once it was resting on the shore, they would retrieve rollers made from pine logs from a hiding place behind the rocks and use ropes to haul the karve to a gravel road, about a quarter mile away. There the boat would be raised by a portable crane and turned on its side, depositing the coal into a wooden hopper. Mule-drawn wagons would be maneuvered under the hopper, filled with coal, and then driven down the road to the settlement of Höfn. Some of the coal would be deposited there for the residents, but most would continue through a carefully guarded pass in the hills to a sprawling facility the spacemen had christened Camp Armstrong. There were more efficient ways to deliver coal, but it was important to keep up the illusion that Höfn was a typical Icelandic settlement. Only a close observer would notice that they consumed about twenty times more coal—as well as grain, lumber, and other supplies—than a settlement the size of Höfn could possibly use.

  O’Brien, impatient to get his meeting with Reyes done with, didn’t wait to help with the unloading. He got out of the boat once it was safely on shore and then walked briskly up the beach to the road. A young man sitting on a boulder, whom O’Brien recognized as Haldor, waved to him as he approached and then disappeared into a nearby barn. By the time O’Brien reached the boulder, Haldor had returned with a horse, tacked out with a leather saddle. O’Brien thanked Haldor, mounted the horse, and set off at a gallop down the road.

  He didn’t slow as he rode through Höfn, ignoring the puzzled glances from farmers, weavers and fishermen who had seen him depart only a week earlier. Usually when one of the spacemen or other higher-ups in the Iron Dragon project left, it was for several weeks, if not months, at a time. Returning after a week was a bad sign, and they all knew it.

  O’Brien let his mount slow to a walk once he reached the pass that led to Camp Armstrong. The guard appeared to be armed with only a spear, but O’Brien knew he had a rifle stashed nearby. Gabe’s gun-making operation had been cranking out a rifle a week on average for the past ten years; they now had enough of them to equip a small army. The guard also had access to a more powerful weapon: hidden in a compartment carved into a boulder by the roadside was a switch that would close a circuit between two lengths of copper wire buried a few feet underground. The other ends of the wires connected to a battery and a light bulb in a small garrison building at the perimeter of the camp, about three hundred yards away. An alarm would go up, sensitive operations would be locked down, and the entire auxiliary defense force would mobilize—assuming that someone was monitoring the alarm. As with all operations at the facility, security was constantly understaffed.

  The guard gave him a simple salute as he passed; he was probably as curious as those at the village, but he was smart enough not to let it show. A different culture pervaded Camp Armstrong than characterized Höfn. Höfn was populated by a combination of the original settlers who had arrived twenty years earlier and newcomers who had not yet proved themselves. Most of its residents had only the slightest notion of what went on beyond the pass; they were told very little and forbidden, under penalty of death, to speak about any of it. Despite—or perhaps because of—this policy, an atmosphere of speculation pervaded the settlement. The villagers kept a close watch on the number of ships arriving at the harbor and what they contained. O’Brien could only imagine the sorts of explanations the villagers devised for events like the arrival of a ship filled to the gunwales with dandelions.

  At Camp Armstrong, a culture of what might be called “informed secrecy” prevailed. In fact, few of them had even heard the name Iron Dragon; the project was referred to by its codename, Pleiades. Most of the engineers knew very little about the project beyond their specific job responsibilities, but they knew Pleiades was crucial to the survival of the human race—and that some very dangerous beings wanted very much to see them fail. Because of these facts, the workers were, as a rule, extremely conscientious about adhering to the confidentiality protocols Reyes and O’Brien had established early on.

  So tight-lipped were the workers at Camp Armstrong that the settlers had begun referring to them sardonically as Dvergar—literally “dwarves,” the name the Norse used for a race of blacksmiths who worked at mysterious machinations underground. Camp Armstrong, by extension, became Svartalfheim—the “dark fields” that were home to the dwarves. The name was certainly fitting: the facility had started out as a massive industrial complex built in a natural cave and powered by geothermal energy. These days it was only the spacemen themselves who insisted on calling the facility Camp Armstrong; even Reyes occasionally slipped when speaking in the Norsemen’s language.

  “Dvergar” eventually became a sort of codename used for those working on Pleiades to identify each other, but Reyes discouraged its wide use. It soon became clear, though, that they were going to need a name for those in service of the project, if only for their internal use. Pleiadeans was awkward and seemed ill-suited for the Norsemen who made up the majority of their number. The name that won out was Eidejelans, a corruption of the name of the organization for which the three spacemen had worked: the Interstellar Defense League. Those who worked on Pleiades identified themselves outwardly as Norsemen, Franks, Saxons, or some other nationality, but to each other they were Eidejelans.

  Over the past decade Svartalfheim had expanded to encompass several acres of land above and around the cave, and the cave itself was referred to as “Hellir,” which was simply the Norse word for “cave.” The spacemen had predictably taken to calling the subterranean workshop Hell. The village of Höfn, with a population of some two hundred people, was at this point essentially a front for Svartalfheim, which now had over a thousand permanent residents. Most of these worked at mundane jobs to keep the facility running or were fulltime students or teachers, but they were all considered Dvergar by the people at Höfn. Once someone traveled Beyond the Pass, with few exceptions, they never left.

  O’Brien’s horse continued down the gravel road toward the cluster of buildings in the distance. The above-ground part of Camp Armstrong told the history of the nascent facility: the cluster of turf longhouses that made up the core of the campus were circled by lodges constructed of pine logs and tar. Several more recent buildings, at the perimeter of the facility, were wood- or steel-framed structures with clapboard siding. These ranged in size from small tool sheds to warehouses a hundred feet on a size and thirty feet tall. Most of the personnel at Svartalfheim lived in one of the large communal dwellings on the west side of the campus
; clustered around these were several dozen small houses that were occupied mostly by the families of the members of the Operations Committee and other higher-ups. Toward the rear of the campus were three large grain silos, filled with grain imported from farms in Normandy and Britain. Svartalfheim produced little of its own food, as Iceland’s land was largely unsuited for farming. The exception were the sheep scattered across the hills, subsisting on the minimal greenery in the area.

  These days, Reyes was usually to be found in her office, located in a pleasant two-story lodge near the center of the main campus, about three hundred yards from the elevator to Hell. O’Brien directed his horse to the stable at the south end of the campus, handing off the horse to the brown-haired teenage girl who was minding the place. O’Brien didn’t recognize her; he assumed she was one of the newcomers who were euphemistically referred to as “blind recruits.”

  Pleiades was in constant need of engineers, craftsmen and other laborers, and one of the things the Vikings did best was “recruit” people from other lands. Early on the spacemen had made peace with the impossibility of secretly assembling a workforce of several thousand people using ordinary recruitment methods. It would be simple enough to lure medieval serfs aboard a ship with an offer of permanent employment in a distant land, but that sort of activity would attract unwanted attention. Additionally, the recruiters needed to be selective: older, unhealthy, illiterate workers—the vast majority of the population of Europe, in other words—were of little use to them. What they were looking for was candidates whose bodies had not yet been ravaged by malnutrition and overwork and whose minds had not been poisoned with superstition and prejudice. As females tended to be more malleable—as well as capable of producing offspring that would make up the bulk of the next generation of the workforce—girls were favored over boys.

  Strangers showing up in a village with the intention of stealing away most of the girls under the age of eighteen, however, tended to cause some friction no matter how diplomatically one went about it. Helena, who was in charge of recruiting, still occasionally negotiated with families to secure the employment of certain prodigies she’d been informed of through her network of spies, but it was impractical to do this on a large scale. Indentured servanthood was common throughout most of Europe at this time, but spiriting away girls to an unknown location, never to be seen again, was not. Even the most desperate parent would balk at such an offer. So in the end, Reyes had decided they weren’t going to ask.

  She’d put Eirik Gustafsson, one of the Norsemen who had been with them since their first weeks on Earth, in charge of the raiding parties. She’d given him only three firm rules for the raiders. The first was that they were not to speak to anyone about Höfn or anything that went on there; the second was that rape was not to be tolerated—and since the abducted girls were at the mercy of their captors, any sexual contact between a girl and a raider was to be considered rape. The third was that unnecessary violence was to be avoided. As some amount of violence was to be expected in forcibly separating children from their parents, she had to rely on Eirik’s judgment—or that of whomever he had selected to lead a given raid. Any man caught breaking any of the three rules was to be executed on the spot.

  Despite these conditions, Reyes and the others had no illusions about what they had sanctioned: it was kidnapping, pure and simple—and often the crime was compounded with assault or even murder. The fact that such raids were a documented fact of life in medieval Europe was little consolation; they could only justify the policy by pointing to the direness of their circumstances: to save the human race, they needed to get to space, and to build a craft capable of carrying humans to space, they needed women.

  These tactics were, after all, one of the prime reasons the Vikings would ultimately conquer much of Europe: they bolstered their numbers by stealing the daughters of their enemies. These girls would be married off, get pregnant, and produce more Vikings. One might expect that the girls would resent their captors and attempt to rebel or escape, but there was nowhere for them to go. Eventually even the older girls would forget their language, culture, and even their families, and become fully integrated into the Norse way of life. The fact that the Norsemen tended—abductions aside—to treat their women with more respect than the “civilized” Europeans of the time—probably didn’t hurt matters. Women in the Norse lands—unlike their contemporaries in Christianized areas—were considered full citizens, able to own property and have a voice in matters affecting the community. Höfn was—at least on the surface—a typical Norse settlement, and as such, it followed the norms of Norse civilization.

  The bulk of the spoils of a Viking raid generally belonged to whoever had financed the expedition. The “recruitment raids” were usually financed—at least nominally—by the jarl at Höfn, a good-natured old man named Ake who was in reality merely a puppet taking orders from Reyes. As a result, at any given time Ake owned between twenty and forty slaves, most of them girls and women between the ages of twelve and twenty. Slavery was not uncommon in Nordic lands, but as there was no large-scale farming or industry in these countries, there was little economic incentive for an individual to own more than a few household servants. In the harsh environment of Iceland, large-scale slavery made even less sense: often a slave consumed more food than he or she could produce.

  Thanks to shipments of grain, meat and other foodstuffs from Normandy and other areas of Europe, there was no shortage of provisions at Höfn, although the villagers kept up appearances of self-sufficiency as best they could. They worked hard, long hours at their various occupations—raising livestock, weaving, fishing, building turf houses—but in many ways they lived an idealized version of Icelandic civilization. Most settlements the size of Höfn subsisted in a state of constant worry about “acts of the gods”: a wasting disease sweeping through a herd of sheep, a shipment of grain lost in a shipwreck, a late frost wiping out a season’s crops. But somehow, no matter what happened at Höfn, the settlement seemed to survive.

  It didn’t take the newly-arrived peasant girls, fresh from an unpleasant voyage across the sea after being taken from their families, to begin to appreciate the idyllic way of life at Höfn. They were expected to work, yes, but certainly no harder than they had at home, and they were given some choice in their assignments. A particularly clever girl would occasionally suspect that the work assignments were being specifically tailored to the recruits’ interests and aptitudes. Any contact they had with their nominal owner, Ake, was in passing; responsibility for their work assignments was delegated to various farmers, fishermen and craftsmen in the village. They were assigned to sleep in a longhouse with a local family, usually that of their de facto employer. Some resented their new life occasionally a newcomer attempted to escape, but it was twenty miles to the next settlement, and none of the neighboring settlements would take in an escaped slave. The jarls of all the settlements in Iceland were, by this time, aware that something strange was going on in the hills north of Höfn—and they had learned it was in their interest not to make too much of it or cause problems for those responsible. Eventually an escaped slave would return to Höfn, one way or another.

  Those who worked hard and made an effort to acclimate to their new home found themselves rewarded with more interesting work and were eventually given time off from work to attend classes, where they would learn to read, write, and perform arithmetic. By this time, the girl would have heard rumors about Svartalfheim and the mysterious goings-on there. They would hear about girls who had been taken to Svartalfheim never to return to Höfn. Eventually, anywhere from a few months to a few years after the girl’s arrival, she would receive a visit from a woman named Helena, who would ask the girl whether she would like to see what was beyond the hills. If she said no, Helena would leave her to work and learn at Höfn for another year, at which point she would return and ask again. A few of the girls chose to remain permanently at Höfn, but most eventually moved on to Svartalfheim. There they would beg
in a much more rigorous program of study designed to prepare them for an apprenticeship or the equivalent of a college-level education, with the ultimate goal of assigning them to work in some aspect of Pleiades. Many would become teachers themselves, educating future recruits. Others would become toolmakers, drafters or engineers.

  The girl at the stables was probably new to Svartalfheim; she might be pursuing a course of study in agriculture or animal husbandry, or she might be a budding chemical engineer helping out at the stables part-time. O’Brien had lost track of the number of disciplines of study that students were pursuing at Svartalfheim; Camp Armstrong had begun to resemble a miniaturized version of the “college towns” that would appear in Europe hundreds of years from now. Despite O’Brien’s frustration about their lack of progress, he had to admit they’d accomplished quite a bit. It was hard to believe all this had grown from a ragtag band of settlers arriving at Höfn twenty years earlier.

  The sun had nearly reached the peak of its arc in the southern sky, and O’Brien hurried to catch Reyes before she left for lunch. These days Reyes spent so much time indoors that she liked to go for long walks during her lunch; there was no telling where she might go or how long she would be gone, and O’Brien wanted to get his meeting with her over as quickly as possible.

  Chapter Six

  O’Brien’s plan was thwarted when he was waylaid on the way to Reyes’s office.

  “Faðir!” cried the boy as he ran toward O’Brien on the path. O’Brien held out his arms to embrace him, and the boy launched himself at O’Brien, nearly knocking him over.

  “Careful, Michael!” chided a woman standing some distance down the path. “Your father isn’t a young man anymore.”

  “May Odin strike me down the day I’m too old to handle a hug from my son,” O’Brien said, squeezing Michael tight. “At least the boy shows some enthusiasm.”