The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  Chapter Forty

  A watchman in the guard tower at Höfn spotted the first ship just after dawn on April 14, 910 A.D. By the time he had alerted Gabe at Svartalfheim, some sixty hundred ships had entered the harbor, and another hundred were close behind. Every few minutes the phone on Gabe’s desk would ring with an updated count. When the number reached two hundred, Gabe informed the panicked guard on the other end of the line that no further updates on the tally were necessary. He observed wryly to himself, when he hung up the phone, that the Eidejelans’ understanding with the King of Norway seemed to have come to an end.

  The eight trebuchets in the hills near the shore, loaded with incendiary bombs, would provide a formidable first-line defense, but Viking ships moved fast, and the trebuchets required time to load and aim. The Eidejelans simply weren’t prepared for an attack by a fleet this size. There hadn’t been any point: if Harald turned on them, Pleiades was finished in any case. They had made a deal with the devil, depending on Harald and Hrólfr for protection, and now the bill was coming due.

  The phone rang one last time, the guard informing Gabe that nearly fifty ships had reached the shore and least another fifty were going to get past the trebuchets. The defenders were falling back to Svartalfheim. Gabe made an announcement over the camp’s public address system, warning that an attack was imminent, and then opened the drawer where he kept the flight suit he’d worn when he and the other spacemen arrived on Earth so many years ago. He stripped down, put on the flight suit, which still fit—barely—and then put his clothes on over top of it. He checked his appearance in the mirror, found it tolerable, and walked out of his office for the last time.

  Gabe was the only one in the administration building when the news came, as he often was these days. O’Brien, Helena, Sigurd and the others had all left weeks earlier, along with most of the engineers. They stayed as long as they dared, but their spies in Normandy reported that Harald was amassing an army, and there was little question where it was headed. The Committee had taken Reyes with them, against the advice of the medical staff: she had regained consciousness for several brief periods over the past few months but was still in critical condition. It was doubtful whether she would survive a long voyage overseas. Her odds at Svartalfheim, however, were even worse.

  They’d always known Camp Armstrong was a temporary facility, but they had hoped to have a few more years to evacuate. Gabe had recalled to Höfn every ship that could be spared, but there simply wasn’t enough room for everyone at Svartalfheim. Half of the ships had been filled with equipment and supplies for Pleiades, leaving only three hundred for personnel. Some three hundred men had to be left behind. It was understood that when the attack came, they would fight to the last man. Gabe had volunteered to be one of them.

  Gabe had been thirty-four years old when Andrea Luhman was pursued through a hyperspace gate to the Sol system. He was now fifty-nine. Too old to make a voyage across the ocean in a Viking ship, he thought, although Sigurd was eight years older than he. Sigurd was adaptable, though: he’d been a warrior, a father, and a carpenter, among other things. Gabe had only ever been a warrior. He’d tried his hand at engineering, but he’d never been more than competent at it—and he’d only ever made weapons. When Gabe wasn’t fighting, he was preparing for a fight. Whatever happened today, this fight would be his last.

  He walked from the administration building, past a dozen rusty machines, a few longhouses, and two gigantic steel propellant tanks, to the low plateau at the heard of Svartalfheim, in the center of which had been constructed a forty-foot-high guard tower. From this tower, Gabe would be able to see the entire facility. He nodded to the men he saw along the way, who were hurrying to their own posts with bows and spears. The guns had all been packed up and loaded aboard the ships with the evacuees. Sigurd had urged him to keep a few, but Gabe refused: he intended to put an end to the threat of Harald’s army once and for all, and he couldn’t risk the guns falling into Harald’s hands.

  Nearly a hundred men had already gathered on the plateau, around the base of the guard tower. They cheered as Gabe arrived, banging their spears and axes against their shields. Many of these men were veterans of Viking raids, but Gabe knew that some had never raised a weapon against another man. They ranged in age from sixteen to eighty. Most were Norsemen; some were Franks or Saxons; a few came from as far as Egypt or Constantinople. Today, though, they were all Eidejelans, and they were all Vikings.

  This would be their last stand.

  Gabe stopped a few paces in front of the crowd and raised his hands to silence the men. When the clamor died down, he began: “I’ve just received word that a large force of men is on its way to Svartalfheim—perhaps as many as two thousand men. I believe these men are doing the bidding of King Harald or Hrólfr of Normandy, perhaps both. They are Norsemen, and possibly kin of some of you. Fierce men, who will not brook surrender. I do not expect many of us to survive this battle. But we knew this day would come, and we do not fight for ourselves. We fight so that those who have gone on ahead—our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, may live, and so that their work can go on. Most of you will never know how important that work is. We are building something of eternal significance, of such great value that our enemies will stop at nothing to obtain our knowledge and treasure for themselves. If we let them, they will pursue our friends and families to the ends of the Earth. But we will not let that happen. Every man we kill today will be one fewer that Harald can send after those who have gone ahead. We face death today, but we will not taste defeat. Let a thousand men attack. Let ten thousand men pour over our fences. Svartalfheim will be their tomb!”

  The men erupted into cheers, and the banging of axes against shields started up again. Men embraced Gabe and patted him on the shoulder as he made his way to the tower. He began to climb the ladder to the platform some thirty feet overhead, his weary knees and knuckles complaining all the way.

  Gabe was greeted at the top of the tower by seven men with bows. The wood plank fence that surrounded Svartalfheim was roughly pentagonal, with a twenty-foot-tall guard tower at each corner. These were a bit smaller than the central tower; each was manned only by four bowmen. The fence—twelve feet high and nearly a mile in length total—followed the crest of the hills that surrounded Svartalfheim; in some places the ground had been built up to provide a better defense. Between the fence and the nearest buildings was a buffer zone of some fifty feet, which would give the archers one last chance to eliminate attackers before they could take cover among the maze of structures clustered at the center of the facility.

  Looking to the south, Gabe saw that the forty or so men fleeing from Höfn—watchmen, trebuchet operators and a few stragglers from the village—had arrived at the gate. They were let inside, and they joined their comrades at the base of the tower. Gabe shouted an order to the men below to take their positions, and half of the men, armed with axes and swords, separated from the group and spread out along the inside of the perimeter fence. Those who remained formed two tight rings around the base of the tower, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the men on the outside carrying bows and those closer to the tower armed with spears.

  Not long after, a shout from the tower to the southeast indicated that the attackers had been spotted. A few seconds later, another shout come from the southwest, and then one from the east. As expected, the attackers were advancing from several directions. The sparse terrain provided no real obstacle to their advance: although travelers usually arrived by way of the pass to the south because it provided the easiest access, there were many places along the three southernmost walls where men could easily climb the low sandy hills. They would be easy targets for the archers in the towers, but a large force attacking from many directions at once could easily overwhelm the defenders.

  Gabe watched silently as hundreds of men, armed with spears, swords and axes, poured toward the fence in several columns three or four men wide. Men in the towers rained arrows down on them, but the
attackers held their shield high, blocking all but a few of the missiles. When the attackers reached the fence, they fanned out in both directions, until they were lined up along nearly the entire southern perimeter and began to attack the fence with their axes. Gabe knew it wouldn’t take them long to find weak spots: the fence was never meant to be more than a perfunctory defense against bandits and raiders.

  The archers in the tower with Gabe held their fire, as the aggressors were too distant to target effectively. They would get their chance soon enough. Gabe was unarmed except for his knife; his role in the battle would be to direct fire, rally the men if necessary, and stay alive as long as possible.

  Harald’s men had brought no ladders with them this time, but they didn’t need them: axes would suffice. When the first attacker broke through the fence, only about forty of the attackers had been felled with arrows. Defenders with axes and swords ran to the gap, making short work of the first few men through. Soon another hole was smashed in the fence, about forty yards north, and the defenders nearby ran to block the men pouring through. Another hole was made to the south, and then one on the west. Soon the entire perimeter defense force was busy hacking at men slipping through the fence at half a dozen spots. Archers directed their fire at the men pressing toward the gaps, but there were too many of them. Some sixty men had now been felled outside the fence and another thirty had been cut down as they came through, but the attackers kept coming. When the defenders could no longer keep up with the men coming through the gaps, Gabe pulled a rope that ran a bell atop the tower—the signal that the men defending the fence were to pull back. The defenders turned and ran toward the tower, past the two rows of their comrades.

  When the men were clear, the archers surrounding the tower opened fire. Between these archers and the ones in the towers, they were able to drop the attackers nearly as fast as they came through the gaps. But some slipped through, and others were working at hacking more holes in the fence. Soon, a hundred men were inside. Some tried to climb up the supports of the towers, while the rest streamed through the gaps between buildings toward the central tower. The invaders moved slowly at first, obviously expecting defenders to be hiding among the buildings. A group of men got to the southern gate and hacked at it until they broke the latch, which had been secured with a heavy iron chain. They pulled the gate open, and hundreds more men streamed in.

  By this time, attackers had managed to climb up the sides of the two southernmost towers and were having some success distracting the archers. More men had begun to climb the other three towers. Meanwhile, those advancing toward the central tower had realized the buildings along the way were unoccupied and began to move more swiftly. The bulk of the force was clustered to the south, so Gabe ordered all the archers on the ground to the south side of the plateau. The plateau, which had been created by leveling the top of a small hill, was roughly circular and about a hundred feet in diameter. The nearest buildings were fifty feet from the base of the plateau; several structures had been razed in anticipation of this fight.

  The invaders approached the plateau sporadically at first, giving the archers time to impale them before they got close. As more and more men continued to stream toward the tower, though, the archers were unable to keep up. As men began to reach the plateau, Gabe ordered the archers to the base of the tower. There they would trade their bows for spears, forming the final line of defense before the tower.

  The tower held no intrinsic value, but as long as the defenders held the tower, they could rain arrows down on the attackers with impunity. To take Svartalfheim, the attackers had to take the tower, and Gabe was betting that they would rely on their overwhelming numbers to do it as quickly as possible. If the attackers held back any of their men, enough of his army might survive to pursue the evacuees. Reyes, O’Brien and the others were thousands of miles away by now, but if Harald had the means, he would keep looking for them—and eventually he would find them. Only complete and utter destruction of Harald’s army would stop him. Everything depended on the attackers sending every man he had at the tower.

  Harald’s men did not disappoint. Except for the few men still harassing the archers in the towers, the entire force poured through the facility toward the tower. Most were still clustered to the south, but eager attackers quickly encircled the plateau. With only the archers in the towers to worry about, the attackers moved up the plateau rapidly; men who fell to arrows were quickly replaced by others. A group of attackers met the first line of defenders at the south of the tower, and soon every defender was engaged.

  The defenders were generally better armed that the attackers: their weapons were steel and engineered in Hell to be durable and perfectly balanced. The men wore steel helmets and strong, lightweight armor made of leather and chain mail, with strategically placed steel plates. The defenders were also, Gabe knew, better trained and disciplined. Viking berserkers were all well and good for striking fear into the hearts of villagers, but to defend a tower against an army required men who could follow orders and fight as one. Gabe had spent hundreds of hours drilling discipline and tactics into these men.

  It paid off: his men acquitted themselves admirably, cutting down three attackers for every one of their own who fell. In the end, though, there were simply too many of the invaders. The front line of defenders was soon exhausted, and the others rushed in to fill the gaps. Within a few minutes, there was only one thin line of men between the attackers and the tower. Corpses littered the plateau.

  Gabe had held off as long as he could, hoping that by some miracle, his men could hold out against the attackers, but their defense was nearly depleted, and hundreds of attackers still remained. Soon Harald’s men would overrun the defenders and take the tower—and with it, the rest of Svartalfheim and whatever secrets it still held. As the archers around him continued to rain arrows down on the attackers, Gabe went to the wall of the tower and opened a metal panel with a key hanging on a leather cord around his neck. Inside were two buttons. The one on the left was labeled HELL. The one on the right had no label. When they’d planned this, years earlier, Reyes had suggested the right button be named HEAVEN, but it seemed a little too on-the-nose to Gabe. They’d still been debating it when the bomb went off and Reyes fell into a coma. Gabe had found it hard to find the humor in their situation after that.

  He took a deep breath and pushed the left button. An instant later, the platform under his feet trembled, and there was a sound like a thunderclap. Shouts of terror and surprise erupted around the tower. Gabe turned and peered into the distance, but he saw no sign of the explosion. So that was it. All their work, all their wonderful machines, buried under ten thousand tons of rock by a few well-placed charges of TNT. Anything of value that hadn’t been loaded onto a ship had been carted into the cave, where no one would ever find it. Hell was no more, and all that was left of Svartalfheim were a few empty buildings and broken-down machines—and two gigantic propellant tanks, one full of oxygen and the other of hydrogen.

  The tanks were about a hundred feet from the base of the tower. Reyes had calculated that an explosion of the tanks would destroy anything within a three-hundred-foot radius. Some Eidejelans would die, Gabe knew, but they were dead anyway. There could only be a few defenders left alive in any case, and soon the attackers would begin to scale the tower. That’s right, Gabe thought, watching the men swarm the tower. Come a little closer. We’ll all arrive in Valhalla together and let Odin sort us out.

  The archers around Gabe, seeing that their situation was hopeless, had set down their bows. Knowing what Gabe had to do, they turned to face him. As the last defenders below them continued to fight, Gabe realized the archers were expecting him to say something. Unfortunately, he’d already made his speech earlier; he hadn’t thought about what he was going to say before he pressed the second button. In the end, he decided it was better to say nothing than to say something stupid with his final breath. Besides, it’s not like these guys could do anything about it. They could
take it up with Odin in Valhalla. He pressed the button.

  Nothing happened.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Sunow had just received word that a knar carrying a much-anticipated shipment of food and other supplies had arrived, and he intended to meet the coxswain at the docks to assist the crew in unloading. He knew the crew would be tired, but his father would want the supplies unloaded tonight. Sunow was delayed on his way to the gate, however, by his six-year-old son, David, who had insisted he play a game of hide-and-seek with him before departing. David took the game seriously, hiding under a tarp protecting a stack of lumber on the far side of the fort. By the time Sunow found David and returned him to his mother, Menichk, who was working in the garden near the front gate with their other two children, he heard the men approaching the gate.

  When the gate opened and strangers began to pour inside, wielding swords and tomahawks, Sunow knew something was wrong. The men were met just inside the gate by two Norsemen with swords, and a scuffle broke out. Sunow told Menichk to get the other women and children and go into the lodge. Unarmed except for a hunting knife, Sunow ran to the corner of the lodge and pulled the rope that led to the big bell in the cupola on the lodge’s roof. The bell rang several times, drowning out the screams and sounds of fighting. Sunow glanced back at the gate and saw that the two swordsmen were on the ground. More than twenty strangers were inside the gate. Most were natives, but a few were white. All the white men and many of the natives wore Norsemen’s clothes, but Sunow recognized few of the Mi’kmaq and none of the white men. The attackers made their way quickly across the hundred yards between the gate and the lodge. The last had barred the gate behind them.