part0008

C arolyn Reyes let the wheelbarrow skid to a halt against the half-built sod wall and let out a relieved sigh. The wheelbarrow was a slipshod apparatus barely deserving of the name, just a box with a solid wooden disk for a wheel and two pegs for feet. Rolling it over the rocky, uneven ground of the valley was alternately grueling and terrifying, depending on the way the volcanic terrain crested and dipped. Still, it was better than moving the turf chunks by hand.

“Careful!” cried Ulf, who was working on placing the turf pieces Reyes had already delivered. He’d attempted to teach Reyes how to place them but had given up in exasperation after an hour. Placing turf was delicate work, appearances to the contrary: if the pieces weren’t placed optimally, the wall might crumble as it got taller, or, worse, the whole thing would begin to sag after a few strong rains, creating gaps that would let the weather in and weaken the house. Reyes had been relegated to working the wheelbarrow. Not far away, a score or so other men and women worked at clearing the land or building their own turf walls. One longhouse, some thirty yards to the southeast, was nearly finished.

Reyes smiled apologetically at Ulf, who responded with a dismissive wave and went back to his work. Deciding she’d earned a break, Reyes walked the short distance from the wall to a nearby rise that offered a better vantagepoint of the burgeoning settlement. Six turf buildings, including the one Ulf and she were working on, were taking shape in the vicinity. Other than clearing the land, little else had been accomplished in the five months they had been here. Reyes wiped the sweat from her brow and arched her back, stretching her sore, overused muscles. She was tired.

She and the other settlers had been working long hours every day since they’d finalized their claim on this land. She had to remind herself to rest occasionally, as it was easy to work oneself to exhaustion. The weather was warm and pleasant, and the days were almost sixteen hours long this time of year. It was now mid-August, and soon the days would grow much shorter. At this latitude, there were less than five hours of daylight for much of the winter. As the settlers possessed no artificial lighting, it was vital to take advantage of the daylight while they could.

She didn’t have to work this hard, she knew. In fact, Ulf and the others probably would prefer it if she stuck to administrative tasks. But she felt it was important that she learn to survive in this new land, and she hoped to earn the respect of the others by demonstrating that she was willing to do manual labor. If anything, though, her efforts had had the opposite effect. She couldn’t match the Vikings in strength, skill or endurance, and she knew that some of them—unaware how much of the Norse language Reyes had picked up—grumbled behind her back that she should leave the real work to those who knew how to do it. After all, didn’t she have a schedule, plans and maps to attend to?

O’Brien had coined the name while they were still en route to Iceland, and it stuck. The name somehow both made the project seem more real and served as a buffer against the sheer insanity of their undertaking. “The Iron Dragon Project” sounded like something whimsical but not impossible.

When she’d first proposed the idea of building a craft that would allow them to return to Andrea Luhman , orbiting twelve hundred miles above them, she’d known it would be an immense undertaking. But when she looked out at the primitive settlement taking shape before her and reflected on what still needed to be done, it was difficult not to despair. The project was so big and so complex, with so many dependencies upon other dependencies, that it had taken her months just to get a handle on where to start. Fortunately, she’d had some time to think.

After fleeing from Normandy, the three spacemen and their Viking allies had made landfall near Reykjavik, in the southwest of the country. Reykjavik barely qualified as a village at this point, but the majority of the land in the area had already been claimed by other settlers, most of them from Norway. The refugees spent the next year with Sigurd’s relatives. Most of the refugees found some work to do, from shearing sheep to weaving cloth or building houses, while Sigurd and the three spacemen surveyed the island for a suitable site for a settlement.

They had ultimately bought several hundred acres of land bordering the southern coast, about a hundred and fifty miles east of Reykjavik. Except for a few fishermen along the coast, the only occupants had been a man named Osmund, who scraped by fishing in the stream, and an Irish hermit called Áengus. They’d bought Osmund’s parcel, and Áengus had turned out to be harmless. The settlers had pitched camp a few miles in from the coast, christening the place Höfn, meaning haven .

It was no mystery why this land had not been claimed: it was nearly worthless, from the typical Norseman’s perspective. There was little game, and not much but scrub and weeds grew in the rocky soil. A stream ran through the valley, providing freshwater, but it was too narrow and shallow to support a significant number of fish. The only mineral resource was bog iron—big chunks of iron-rich volcanic rock that littered the marshlands. There were no trees to speak of; the only material available for building was turf: sections of vegetation and soil that had to be chopped from the marshes with spades.

Despite the land’s lack of resources, Reyes and her companions had judged it suitable for their purposes. They would make use of the bog iron for certain, and there was another resource bubbling up from underground that would be invaluable when the project was farther along. The main benefit the parcel offered, though, was secrecy: they were a long way from the power-hungry Harald Fairhair and the kings of Europe who might take an interest in their project. Their only neighbors were farmers and fishermen.

They had learned the hard way the costs of getting involved in politics. Their Norse allies had been invaluable to them, but the spacemen had also made dangerous enemies. Undoubtedly Harald’s ships scoured the North Sea for them even at this moment. The spacemen had considered seeking an alliance with one of the other European kings, perhaps Aethelwulf of Wessex, but in the end Reyes and the others had agreed that as far as was possible, they would stay out of politics. The alternative would be to manage an ever-widening network of enemies and alliances, all while trying to remain hidden from the Cho-ta’an, who presumably still lurked somewhere in Europe.

If they could remain unseen by the Cho-ta’an and unnoticed by the powers of Europe, the primary obstacle they faced was the passage of time. It would take decades to build the infrastructure capable of producing a craft that could reach orbit. Would Reyes, Gabe and O’Brien even live to see it? If they did not, would they be able to impress upon the next generation the importance of their mission? They were the only three people on Earth who had glimpsed the end of the human race—and that end was 1300 years in the future. It would take a lot of faith for someone born in medieval Europe to commit to this project without any direct evidence the Cho-ta’an even existed.

Reyes arrested this line of thought before it could get out of hand. This was just one of many dead-ends her mind might wander down on any given day—and one of the reasons she tried to keep herself busy with physical labor. Beyond the sheer scope of their project, the amount of time it would require, and the dearth of natural resources, another challenge loomed large: they didn’t have the brainpower needed to run a space program.

As an engineer, Reyes was accustomed to defining problems and developing solutions for them, but there were simply too many problems for one person to solve—and as the project advanced, the need for skilled personnel would increase exponentially. On top of the sheer volume of mental work that needed to be done, there was the fragility of their organizational structure: Reyes was the only engineer they had. O’Brien was pretty good with his hands, but as a scientist his thoughts tended to drift toward the abstract; he’d never make it as a leader or project manager. Gabe was something of a jack-of-all-trades: he was a good guy to have in a pinch—particularly if you were being attacked by a horde of axe-wielding Vikings—but he didn’t have the patience or depth of knowledge to spearhead a project like Iron Dragon . That meant that Reyes was a huge potential failure point. They could rely to some extent on the considerable intellectual resources of everyone aboard Andrea Luhman —including two pilots and a physicist, as well as indirect access to the ship’s terabytes of technical data—but without a competent engineer to manage the project on the ground, it would fail.

The urgency of expanding the amount of brainpower available to them on the ground had prompted the spacemen to take a huge risk: for the first time since Slater’s death, they had split up. Reyes would remain in Iceland while Gabe and O’Brien recruited potential scientists and engineers. Looking out over the paltry collection of half-built turf buildings, Reyes had never felt so alone. The only two people on Earth who fully understood the settlement’s purpose were Gabe and O’Brien, and currently they were both over two thousand miles away.