The Dream of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  “Heading east to another village. Uslu or something.”

  “O’Brien and Slater too?”

  “No, they stayed behind.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “As safe as sending them along with a bunch of people who think we’re to blame for the murders of their families, yeah. Anyway, O’Brien can barely move.”

  “Copy that,” Gabe said. “I’ll try to hold out until you get here. Gabe out.”

  He wearily got to his feet. How many more men would Harald send? Fifty? A hundred? Physical exhaustion aside, the lander’s defenses had been damaged and he was running low on ammo. He still had plenty of rounds for the railgun, but the battery was dead and he had maybe two and a half magazines of ammo left for the pistol.

  He got to his feet. Okay, he thought. First things first. Recharge the railgun.

  He went into the lander and rummaged around until he found a twenty-meter power cord. He pulled the female end out the hatch, climbed up to the casemate, and plugged it into the railgun’s battery pack. After scanning the horizon for Harald’s men, he slid back down the lander, went inside and plugged the male end into a power jack at the rear of the cabin. The display on the jack read twelve percent.

  “Fuck,” Gabe said. He tapped his comm. “Reyes, we’ve got a problem.”

  “What… is it?” Reyes said after a moment.

  “Lander batteries are at twelve percent. And the railgun is dead.”

  “What?” Reyes gasped. “What have you… been doing?”

  “Besides killing Vikings? Not a damn thing. We must have a short, draining power. How much is twelve percent?”

  Reyes didn’t speak for a moment. “Maybe… ten shots with the railgun.”

  Gabe cursed to himself. Reyes’s answer jibed with his own educated guess. Even if he could get all the power from the lander’s batteries to the railgun, it wouldn’t be nearly enough. “I’m going to have to fire up the reactor.”

  “Can’t do it,” Reyes said. “Shutdown. Ten minutes. Maybe five… more shots.”

  Gabe had anticipated this answer as well. Because the reactor’s control systems were offline, the safety override would shut the reactor down after ten minutes. He’d get a little more power, but not enough. And then the reactor would be hard down for six hours. “Can I disable the override?”

  “No!”

  “The vehemence of your reply indicates I can.”

  “No, Gabe. Not safe.”

  “I know. Meltdown. Big explosion. We covered this earlier. How long would I have?”

  “Another five minutes. Maybe ten. Not worth it.”

  “Even if it means losing the lander? Because if I can’t get forty shots out of the railgun, I might as well start running.”

  For some time, there was no response.

  “Reyes?” Gabe said. “Gonna need an answer here. I’m out of options.”

  “You can wire around the override,” Reyes said at last. “It’s like a fuse. Open panel. Little green box. Pull it, connect contacts… with copper wire.”

  “Copy that,” Gabe said.

  “You’ll get… fifteen minutes total. Shut down or… we’re screwed.”

  “Understood,” Gabe said. “Gabe out.”

  Gabe checked the jack readout: it was down to ten percent. At the rate the railgun’s battery pack was charging, the lander’s batteries would be drained in less than ten minutes. That would give him about ten shots. This was the downside of the railgun: as deadly as it was, it took a hell of a lot of power to get those bullets traveling at over a thousand meters a second. He might get another ten if he pushed the limit on the reactor. It wasn’t going to be enough. Might as well wire the override and then run. Destroy the lander and, with any luck, take out Harald’s men at the same time. Twenty thousand liters of hydrogen would make a hell of an explosion. If there was anything left of the lander, it would be scattered over many kilometers. The fireball would probably be a couple hundred meters in diameter. With the proton reactor melting down, radiation was another concern. He’d want to avoid being downwind for a few days. At this point, it was starting to seem like the best option.

  But was there any reason the muzzle velocity needed to be that high? Gabe had been trained to fight against Cho-ta’an, who used carbon-fiber body armor. These guys were wearing chain mail and leather. At a thousand meters a second, the bullets had torn through their wooden shields like paper. Hell, the pistols topped out at four hundred meters per second, and they were plenty deadly. So: crank down the muzzle velocity to five hundred meters per second. The railgun wasn’t very efficient; about half the energy was lost with every shot. But halving the velocity should increase his capacity by close to fifty percent. If he pushed the reactor to the limit, that was about thirty shots. Between that and the pistol, it might be enough.

  The first step was to wire around the override. That was easy enough: he grabbed the electrician’s kit found a length of copper wire, located the green box Reyes had mentioned, yanked it out, and wired the two contacts together. For good measure, he used a battery-powered soldering gun to make sure the connections were good. On a whim, he grabbed several rolls of solder and shoved them into the pockets inside his suit. Then he held his breath as he threw the switch to fire up the reactor. A series of lights flashed, and a warning appeared telling him that a problem had been detected with the fusion regulation system. He tapped a PROCEED button, and was prompted for a root access code. He entered the code and the reactor hummed to life. Then he set his comm to give him a warning at ten minutes, and again at fifteen. Hopefully he’d be done before Harald’s men showed up, because otherwise he was going to have to climb down into the lander in the middle of the fight to keep the reactor from going critical.

  That raised another question: if the Vikings showed up while he was still charging, they might be smart enough to cut the cable. They had no understanding of electricity, of course, but every time he’d made the mistake of thinking of them as primitive people, they’d surprised him with their canniness. All it would take was one stray swing of an axe and he’d be screwed. The solution was brutal but elegant: lacking any heavy-duty power tools, he cranked the muzzle rate of the railgun back up to a thousand meters per second and fired a round right through ceiling. The hole was just big enough to thread a cable through. After assessing his options, he decided to move the battery back and compulsator inside the lander, where they would be less vulnerable to attack. He threaded the thick cable from the compulsator through the hole in the ceiling to the gun.

  While the battery charged surveyed the horizon from the casemate. Still no sign of Harald’s men. Had he been wrong? Or had the survivors met the reinforcements and warned them against attacking? There was no way to know, and nothing to do but prepare for the worst. He could only hope Reyes and the others arrived before Harald’s men did.

  Gabe spent the next ten minutes shoring up the spike barrier as best he could, resetting the poles that had been knocked over and replacing some that had been hacked in pieces. Another key element of his defense was in the process of disappearing: the ice on the lander was melting in the warm sun. All he could do is drag the bodies off the wings and away from the lander so as not to give the attackers any additional advantage.

  He was finishing this task when he spotted a group of men advancing across the plain from the south. They were moving fast. He checked the railgun’s battery before climbing into the casemate. It read thirty-one percent. At five hundred meters per second, that would give him maybe twenty shots. If he kept the reactor running—and stayed alive—for another five minutes, he might get ten more. The group moving across the plain toward him looked to be at least sixty strong.

  The Norsemen were bunched together, so Gabe set the rate of fire to two per second. That gave him just enough time to shift his aim from one man to the next without spending more than one bullet per man. When they were a hundred meters out, he started firing.

  Chapter Twenty-two

&n
bsp; Gabe managed to drop about twenty of them before they reached the spike barrier. Most of these were only wounded; at the lower velocity, the bullets didn’t tear through armor and flesh the way they had with the last bunch. The compulsator was having a hard time keeping up the rate of fire, indicating the battery was getting low. There was nothing for it but to keep shooting. Twenty or so men with bows held back, firing arrows at him from about fifty meters. Gabe ignored them; arrows that went over the casemate wall bounced harmlessly off his helmet or made superficial tears in the flight suit. The worst they could do was bruise him; the velocity of the arrows wasn’t great enough to penetrate the nanofiber armor. Gabe focused on the men trying to get past the spikes, taking out four more before the gun quit. He dropped it and drew his pistol, hitting three more men as they hacked at the spikes.

  Before those three even hit the ground, a dozen more were at the barrier, swinging axes or shoving the poles out of the way with their hands. The others swarmed around the other side of the barrier to come at him from all sides. Gabe hit as many as he could as they came through, but there were just too many. They swarmed through gaps in the barrier and climbed over their fallen countrymen and onto the wings. On the left side, which was still in shadow, the men had to tread carefully to avoid slipping on the ice, but those approaching from the east had little trouble. Gabe emptied his magazine into the three men nearest the casemate, paused to reload, and then emptied another magazine at the next bunch. The eastern wing was now clear, but five men remained on the ground on the east side, and the ones on the left wing were almost on him. He climbed on top of the eastern wall of the casemate and jumped, popping out the empty magazine as he did so.

  Gabe landed hard on the snow about ten paces from the lander and rolled, grabbing another magazine from his belt. He slapped the magazine in place and turned to face the lander, putting two bullets in a man approaching with a spear. There were two more men right behind him; Gabe managed to put them down with one bullet each. He had exactly three bullets left, and one chance to save the lander.

  Men were now swarming all over the wings and fuselage, but the closest able-bodied man on the ground was a good ten meters away, toward the nose of the lander. Gabe got to his feet and sprinted toward the hatch. The man near the nose, brandishing an axe, tried to intercept him, but Gabe shot him between the eyes. Gabe slammed into the hatch, tapped the code and yanked on the latch. As the hatch slid open, Gabe turned to his left and shot another man, who had jumped down from the wing. There were three more behind him. Gabe stepped into the lander, slamming the hatch shut behind him. He collapsed onto a seat and exhaled in relief.

  Outside, Vikings swarmed over the lander. It didn’t take them more than a few seconds to start with the axes, trying to chop their way through the craft’s metal exterior. The lander was pretty tough, but it had been badly damaged in the crash. If the Vikings were smart—and there was every indication they were—they’d have no trouble locating the weak points. They learned quickly that the ballistic polycarbonate used for the windshield and portholes was stronger than the rest of the exterior and that the reinforced steel of the hatch made it an unattractive target. They set about banging on any crack or seam they could find; any man who didn’t have an axe grabbed one from one of the fallen. The sides of the lander crashed and shuddered around him. He figured it would take them fifteen minutes, max, to get inside.

  Gabe’s comm chimed with an alarm, indicating that the reactor had been running for five minutes beyond the automatic shutdown point. Reyes had said he had at most another five minutes before the reactor exploded. He began to get up to hit the shutoff but then changed his mind and sat down again.

  He tapped his comm. “Hey, Reyes, you there?”

  “Here,” Reyes said. “What the hell’s that noise?”

  “That would be the angry Vikings trying to chop their way into the lander with axes,” he said, yelling to be heard over the racket.

  “You’re… inside the lander?”

  “Didn’t have any choice. I think I may have to let the reactor blow.”

  “What?” Reyes asked. “No! We’re thirty minutes out. If you can—”

  “In thirty minutes, the lander is going to be in pieces. I’m sorry, Reyes. I did my best. Doesn’t look like we’re getting off Earth.”

  “Even if…” Reyes started. She gasped for breath. “Still need lander.”

  Gabe sighed. It sounded like Reyes was starting to accept the reality of their situation. That was good. But he had more bad news for her. “I’ve been thinking about that,” Gabe said. “The lander is valuable, but it’s also a magnet for trouble. I think we have to accept that Harald wants it more than we do. These guys aren’t going to stop.”

  “Half an hour,” Reyes said. “We have guns…”

  “I’m sorry, Reyes. I’m not going to hold out that long. Save your ammo and keep your distance. The explosion will take out the rest of Harald’s men. If we destroy the lander, maybe he won’t send more right away. At the very least, it’ll give you time to get away before more come.”

  “Gabe, God damn it—”

  “It’s been an honor working with you, Chief,” he said. “Gabe out.” He cut the comm.

  Reyes would hate him for this, but that was okay. He knew he was right, and he didn’t have time to explain it to her. He had been wrong about the lander. All it had done was make them a target of every spear-toting asshole in Norway. If they’d been smart, they’d have taken anything valuable that they could move out of the lander and left the lander itself for Harald. Because of their insistence on holding onto the lander, they were going to lose everything. Sure, he could shut down the lander and wait for Reyes and Sigurd to arrive, but he knew how that would go: even armed with pistols, Reyes and the others wouldn’t be able to defeat thirty men—particularly once the Norsemen had control of the lander. And if by some miracle they did take the lander back, it was only a matter of time before Harald sent more men. When he did, they’d be out of ammo. They might be able to grab the portable transmitter and a few other items, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Better to conserve ammo, eliminate as many of Harald’s men as they could, and deny him the prize of the lander.

  As the banging outside continued, Gabe shook his head. So this is how it was going to end—hacked to death by Vikings. It would be funny if it weren’t so horrific. Would they kill him quickly or make him suffer? He had read once about the Viking method of execution called the “blood eagle,” in which the ribs were severed from the spine and the lungs pulled through the opening to create a pair of “wings.” The odds were that they were all going to die in a fireball pretty soon, but he had no doubt Harald’s men could cause him a great deal of pain during the few minutes he had left. He drew his pistol. It still had two bullets left. One would do.

  As the Norsemen stomped all over the lander, looking for weak points to exploit with their axes, it occurred to Gabe that he’d left the railgun battery charging. He wouldn’t put it past these guys to figure out how to use the railgun. He’d come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t getting out of this, but he didn’t particularly want to die slowly of a bullet to the spine or abdomen. He walked to the battery pack and yanked the cord from the compulsator. As tempting as it would be to leave the cable in place and hope one of the Vikings would hack through it and electrocute himself, he couldn’t risk it. Besides, they’d be as likely to electrocute him as themselves.

  The idea stuck in his head. Those bastards were crawling all over the lander’s exterior, which was made of a steel alloy. It was also wet, and the Harald’s men were wearing boots made of cloth or leather. A high-voltage electrical charge running through the lander might incapacitate enough of them long enough for him to escape. The heat shield panels on the bottom of the lander would probably provide enough resistance to keep the charge from running directly to ground. He wouldn’t be able to save the lander, but he might be able to get away.

  A glance at the railgun’s batter
y indicator indicated it was at seven percent. That should be enough to charge up the compulsator one more time. If he could channel that power through the lander’s hull rather than sending it to the railgun, it would create a hell of a shock. It might not kill the Norsemen, but it would definitely stun them for a few seconds.

  He pulled as much of the cable through the hole in the ceiling as he could, chopped the end off, and stripped the leads. He tied one to a cargo hook near the stern. Holding onto the insulation of the other lead with his gloved hand, he plugged the cable back in and turned on the compulsator. While he worked on this, one of the Norsemen manage to break through the ceiling with an axe a couple meters behind him. Sunlight was already streaming through another gap in the paneling toward the cockpit. Somebody had shoved one of the spiked poles through it and was trying to get enough leverage to pry the panels apart. They’d be inside any minute now. Between them and the impending explosion of the reactor, he didn’t have much time.

  The compulsator beeped, indicating it was fully charged. Gabe took a deep breath, drew his gun, and crouched down on the padding that lined the floor of the lander. Without the rifle’s trigger mechanism acting as a switch, the compulsator’s charge would drain as soon as the circuit was completed. After making a final check to make sure he wasn’t touching any metal, he reached toward the door with the lead. Electricity arced from the lead to the door, followed by a loud pop as the wire contacted the metal.

  Several men yelped in pain or fear. The axes stopped their banging and for a moment Gabe heard nothing but men falling and sliding off the lander. He drew his gun and pulled the hatch open.

  Two men stood immediately in front of them. He put a bullet in each of them, slid his gun into the holster and ran out of the hatch. A dozen men lay near the lander on both sides of the hatch, groaning and looking around in confusion. Several more, who hadn’t been touching the lander when the compulsator went off, stood in front of Gabe. They stared at him, clearly amazed by whatever magic had just struck down their comrades. Gabe turned to his left, drew his knife and ran.