Chapter 1: Row For Your Life

The Near Future

Torvald Gunnarson considered the situation as calmly as he could. Succumbing to the panic that was just below the surface of his thinking would doom everyone on the Frijhof. They might only have a few hours left to live but he was not about to give up before then. He would continue sailing his longship right until the waves came over the gunwales.

That wouldn’t be more than a few hours, though. Torvald had spent half of his forty years at sea, and the gale they had come through was probably the worst he had ever seen. The small fleet he had led from Olaf’s Fjord had consisted of six snekkjas of various sizes, from twenty to almost thirty benches, all headed for the southern islands. They were part of the colonization and conquest of the southern islands; more than simply pillaging and returning home with the spoils of the sack, Torvald was leading a sizable portion of his clan to fertile new lands.

Shortly after the gale started, the Gotvolk was capsized by a rogue wave. The Gotvolk was the smallest of the ships, a snekkja of just twenty benches, but she was just the start. Over the next twelve hours Torvald lost track of the other four ships in his fleet. It was entirely possible that the fleet had been dispersed by the storm, and the others were simply spread out so far from Frijhof that they couldn’t be seen. Torvald didn’t think so, though. It seemed much more likely that they had been lost, also.

Frijhof would be next. At the height of the storm the mast had snapped near the mast fish. The sail had been dropped and reefed at the start of the storm, but it didn’t matter. The storm had ripped the mast apart and dragged it and the sail overboard. Three men had died when that happened, two being dragged overboard and the third killed as he tried to cut the rigging loose. Just as bad, his cousin Nori had his skull crushed by the spar as it went over the side.

Now they rowed for their lives, but when the mast had gone, the hull had sprung. Frijhof was a well-built ship, and he had taken her to sea many times, but the clinker-built construction tended to leak under normal usage. This was not even remotely normal usage. Even as every man aboard was rowing, every woman and child were bailing water from the bilges - and they were not bailing fast enough. Frijhof was settling in the heavy swells; it was a race between the water coming in and the water being bailed out, and the water was winning the race.

“Torvald! TORVALD!”

Torvald looked forward to where his lookout was standing. Sven Halstrom was pointing to port, and Torvald turned his eyes in that direction. A half-circle of bright light had appeared in the relentless gray of the storm, and through the circle he could see a calm sea. If they could reach the calm patch, they might be able to stave off sinking. He adjusted the tiller to aim for the circle and cried out, “Róa! Róa! Róa fyrir þinn lif!” {"Row! Row! Row for your life!"}

Only a few of the men looked over their shoulders to see what Torvald was yelling about, but when they saw the circle of light and decent weather, they added their voices. ‘Róa! Róa!’ they cried out, and the exhausted rowers put their final strength into their oars.

It was the longest half hour of Torvald’s life, but as they sailed through the half-circle into sunlight the seas suddenly calmed. Within minutes the water seeping through the joints slowed, the winds dropped, and the waves stopped trying to swamp the ship. Ahead of them he could see land, a shore on the horizon. “Róa! Land!” he cried out, pointing over the rowers’ heads. He adjusted the tiller to aim Frijhof towards the land, and the ship slowly approached the land. The land resolved into a small island, then a beach appeared, and then the exhausted crew could hear the surf hitting the sand. With their final dregs of strength, they rowed until Frijhof grounded on the beach.

“Doctor Stevens, are you seeing this? I’m getting a blip on the locus.”

Doctor William Stevens, the physicist responsible for overseeing the locus system’s monitoring, glanced over at the doctoral student who had called for him. He was watching two different screens of his own. “Yeah, Joey, I’m catching it. Something is going on. I’m calling Hammersmith.”

“I don’t know what’s happened, but something happened,” said Joe Magliotti, Stevens’ main assistant and the senior tech involved.

Stevens nodded and picked up his phone. He hit a button and was connected to the research team leader, Doctor Paul Hammersmith. The phone rang twice and then it was picked up. “Yes, Will?”

“It’s the locus, Doctor Hammersmith. It’s very unstable and we are picking up some blips on the recorders,” said Stevens.

“How bad?”

“It’s not the bad, it’s that we can’t explain it, and I don’t like that. The noise level in the system is an order of magnitude greater than normal, with blips to another order of magnitude.”

Stevens could almost see Hammersmith nodding to himself. “Let’s shut it down. We can run a full diagnostic on the system and see if we can make sense of the system noise. We shouldn’t be having the noise level we are seeing, let alone a higher level.”

“Agreed, Doctor. We’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you, Will. I’ll see you at the review tomorrow morning.” Hammersmith disconnected.

Stevens turned back to his assistant. “We are shutting down the locus and initiating a full system diagnostic.”

“We need to figure out the noise issue,” said Joe Magliotti, the assistant. “If our calculations are anywhere near correct, we shouldn’t have anything like the noise levels we are seeing.”

“That’s what Hammersmith said, too. Call it up on your screen, Joey, and let’s shut the sucker down.” The two men began pulling up screens on their computers and shutting down the locus system. Five minutes later the system went down.

Nobody on the Frijhof noticed the dark half-circle on the horizon behind them disappear.

“Ma’am, I just got a hit on the pulse doppler,” said the sergeant into his microphone.

“Anything more specific, Sergeant Bannister?”

“Very low and very slow, and I swear it wasn’t there a minute ago,” was the reply.

“How low and slow?”

“Like sea level and moving at only a few knots. Small, too, like a cabin cruiser.”

Flight Lieutenant Amelia Bulrush got out of her seat and headed to the station Sergeant Max Bannister was sitting at. “Nobody’s running around in a cabin cruiser around here,” she commented. “Could it have been a periscope?” They were northeast of the Shetland Isles.

“Wrong signature, and too close to land.”

“Show me.” The young flight lieutenant pulled a rolling chair closer to the sergeant, who was old enough to be her father. He pulled up the radar capture on his screen and ran it. “You’re right, that’s odd.”

“Can we circle around and check it out?” he asked.

Flight Lieutenant Bulrush shrugged and changed the switch on her headset. “Skipper, this is Flight Lieutenant Bulrush. Sergeant Bannister has an unusual contact northeast of the Shetlands and I concur. Can we circle and check it out?”

The voice of Squadron Leader Frank Tennison, mission commander on the E-3 AWAC bird, said, “Hold one.” He came back online two minutes later. “Negative, Flight Lieutenant. We’re fighting headwinds and Flying Officer Munro says we are too low on fuel. Where was the contact?”

Bulrush gave her the coordinates and added, “It’s near that training base that is in the no-go zone.”

Tennison grunted an acknowledgement, and said, “I’ll call it in. Somebody downstairs can check on it.”

“Roger that, sir,” replied the lieutenant. She broke the connection and turned to Bannister. “No go, Sergeant Bannister. We don’t have enough go-juice to circle around. We’re heading back to the barn at Waddington. They’ll call it in, though.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ve done our part, at least.”

She nodded and headed back to her regular station. She was still curious about the contact, though. The radar return had been for something the size of a cabin cruiser, but nobody in their right mind would be sailing a cabin cruiser in the middle of the North Sea northeast of the Shetlands. Nobody was that crazy!

Torvald wanted to collapse like the rest of the survivors of the Frijhof, but he knew they needed to get off the boat and onto land. He had lost track of time during the storm, but if they had grounded on the beach at high tide, they would be safe. If, however, they had grounded at low tide, when the tide came in, they could well be lifted off the beach. The Frijhof was too damaged to survive that without major repairs. They needed to get off the ship and their possessions above the high-water mark. They could worry about the ship afterwards.

“Af! Af! Fá eigi á bátrrinn!” {"Off! Off! Get off the boat!"} he cried out. He began pushing the exhausted survivors towards the bow, ordering his sailors to help the women and children off the ship. They splashed ashore and he ordered them to form a line and begin unloading what they could.

Gunnarson counted the survivors. The Frijhof had twenty-eight benches, which meant fifty-six rowers. About half his men had been single, but the other half had been family men, and had brought wives and children. Three of the men and one of the women had died during the storm, and one of the children had died during the night after hitting his head and falling overboard. He counted fifty-three men, twenty women, and eleven children.

Sven came up to him. He looked as exhausted as Torvald, but he had a smile on his face. “Loki gerði eigi fá oss, eh, Torvald.” {"Loki didn’t get us, eh, Torvald."}

“Vér munu fá til Valhallennr, Sven.” {"We will get to Valhalla yet, Sven."} replied Torvald. Only a warrior who died in battle, weapon in hand, qualified for living in Valhalla with Odin and the Æsir.

The two men clasped forearms, then Torvald ordered his friend to lead a small group of warriors inland, to see where they were. Frijhof wasn’t going anywhere without a total rebuild. He would begin organizing a camp near the shore and begin drying out their belongings. Sven nodded and moved off, to organize a half-dozen of the warriors. They gathered weapons and dry clothing and climbed off the beach.

It was difficult to build a fire, for the simple reason that there was little fuel. There were no trees visible, just a hilly bog area. They scraped up driftwood and broken spars and oars to build several fires. Sven returned a few hours later, smiling. He and his men were carrying several sheep carcasses.

Torvald smiled when he saw them. “Velkomnir!” {"Welcome!"}

Sven smiled in return and pointed at the sheep. “ Vér vitumk matr! Þat var réttr ganga of.” {"We found dinner! It was just walking around."}

Torvald snorted out a laugh and led the men to the fires. The sheep were quickly and expertly butchered and the women began preparing a meal. Torvald took his friend aside and said, “Ok? Hvat gerði þú vita ?” {"And? What did you find?"}

Sven shrugged. “Mang sauðum. Ok roaðr. Vætki ella.” {"Many sheep. And a road. Nothing else."} He explained further. The road was a good road, wide and graveled and flat, not rutted, so people must be around. It was a good road, too, not a rutted mud path like was common back home or in the southern islands. That meant it was the road of a rich people, but he hadn’t seen any people, none at all. The same went for the sheep. They were just wandering around, without fencing or marking or branding. A people rich enough to keep a well-maintained road but who let their sheep wander around? It made no sense to either man.

The final act of the day was to gather every able-bodied man, woman, or child, and drag Frijhof as far onto the beach as possible. Then everybody collapsed and fell asleep around the fires.