Chapter 6: Meeting The Neighbors

Travis watched Lars attempt to converse with Torvald for about half an hour before heading out. It seemed that learning a language involved a lot of hand waving and gesticulation, and head nodding and shaking. Eventually he got bored and left the barracks. “Where did they store the gear these guys brought with them?” he asked one of the guards.

“The storage tents over there,” he was told.

“Thanks.” Travis headed in the direction the guard pointed and was let into a large wall tent. Several tables were set in rows, and large bins were arrayed on the tables. There was a guard on the doorway, and he asked, “Did we just throw everything together, or did we separate it somehow?”

The guard, a corporal, came in with him and said, “Captain Kowalski said to keep things sorted out. When they were taken to the showers, we did it in groups of five or six, and we made them strip naked before we let them in. We took a picture of the owner and then wrote down the number and wrote it on the bin. Then we separated the weapons and put all the clothing through a steam cleaner, sort of.”

“Very efficient,” commented Travis.

“Some of the coats and stuff seemed kind of bulky, you know, so we checked the seams and found that a few of these guys had coins and gems and such hidden away. Those we also separated.”

“I’ll want to see that stuff, too.”

“Yes, sir. It’s all in the bins, though their weapons didn’t always fit. I have to tell you, when they figured out we found their hidden stuff, some of them got pretty pissed.”

Travis smiled. “Wouldn’t you be?” He just got a wry nod in return and the guard went back to the doorway.

Travis went from bin to bin, looking at the various items that hadn’t been given back to the owners. Each bin had one or more knives, a collection of bags with some coins in silver or copper, what seemed like personal keepsakes marked in what he thought were runes, and belts and sashes in leather and homespun wool. The weapons were fascinating, a mix of long swords, spears, wooden shields, and a few bows and arrows. The workmanship was amazing and was definitely not mass-produced.

“Who are you?” asked a contralto voice in a British accent.

Travis turned to face a very pretty brunette who looked to be in her mid-twenties. “Travis Shockley. Who are you?”

“I’m Jennifer Wiltshire. I’m here to catalog everything. What are you doing snooping through everything? This area is off limits!”

“Obviously not, not if I’m here, anyway.”

Jennifer replied, “You need to leave before I speak to Major Smythe. We can’t be having people just wandering through trying to figure out what’s worth taking.”

“Slow your roll, Jenny. I’m not looking to take anything. I’m just looking to see what these guys brought with them.”

“Who are you?” she demanded.

Travis smiled at the feisty young woman. “Like I said, my name is Travis Shockley. I arrived this morning and I work for the Office of World Science in Langley.”

She looked at him for a moment and then her eyes widened. “Langley! You’re with the CIA!”

“Yes. I brought a linguist with me. He’s trying to talk to the Vikings, or whoever they are. Who are you?”

“I was brought in from Oxford...”

“Oxford! Impressive!”

“The Department of Viking and Old Norse Studies. My boss was told that some Viking artifacts were found on a remote island north of the Shetlands. It was described as uninhabitable and undeveloped and he decided to send me instead of somebody more valuable,” she replied.

“That doesn’t sound like a glowing reference,” replied Travis, smiling.

Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Tell me about it! It would be great if I could write a paper on it, but I’ve been told everything is classified Super-Duper Top Secret, or worse. And the name is Jennifer, not Jenny.”

Travis stuck out his hand. “Jennifer. Got it. Can we be friends now and talk?”

The response was an amused snort and, “Yes, we can be friends. I’ll tell you all about Oxford and you can tell me all about the CIA.” She shook Travis’ hand.

“The moon landing was real, and we didn’t have Kennedy killed,” he said. “Maybe you can tell me all about that license-to-kill thing with your MI6.”

Jennifer laughed. “So, what are you doing here? In here, I mean. You actually found somebody who speaks Old Norse?”

“Are these guys actually Vikings? That’s one of my main jobs here, figuring out if these guys are real Vikings,” he asked.

“Huh. Well, everything I am seeing is that they’re real Norsemen. They act like it and all their stuff is authentic. The real question is how they got here. If they are Norsemen, and the Norse Era ended eight hundred years ago, how did they get here? Time travel? Explain that to me!” she answered.

“I can’t. That’s another thing I’m supposed to figure out.” He shrugged and said, “So, this stuff is real? Real Viking, I mean.”

“That’s a term we should be careful with. Technically speaking, the Vikings were Norsemen, or Nordlingen, which simply means they were men from the North. Northmen if you will. Viking was more of a job description. When they headed out to go raiding, they were going aviking. The name stuck.”

With that the Oxford student explained what they were looking at, along with how she learned about this stuff. Jennifer Wiltshire was twenty-five, a doctoral student, and the lowest on the totem pole when it came to doing unpleasant jobs and being sent to unpleasant places. Now, with the dream assignment of a lifetime, she was unable to even consider publishing what would be the doctoral thesis of the century.

“For what it’s worth, Jennifer, don’t sweat not being able to publish. This isn’t permanent. At some point this is going to come out, and probably sooner than you might think. At that point you become the expert. Something to think about, anyway.”

“This is going to become known?”

Travis nodded. “Probably. How are we going to hide this? We’ve got everything on lockdown, but sooner or later it’s going to get out. We have a company of Rangers, and at least that many British support people. Doctors, nurses, engineers, pilots, you name it. They are all here. Add in other support people they’ve talked to, or people in Washington or London, not to mention the Vikings themselves, almost a thousand people have probably heard about this. Somebody is going to talk, probably in a matter of weeks, or months at best.”

“So, you’re not here to silence everybody? That’s good, at least for me,” Jennifer asked.

“This is not some Robert Ludlum or Trevanian novel. We are not about to kill a thousand people. Besides, that sort of thing never works. Somebody always survives or manages to hide or get away. Forget it. That’s just a bad movie or spy novel.” He pointed at the Viking possessions. “So, tell me, is there any way to actually date this stuff to the Viking period? Any foolproof way to say this is original Viking stuff and not just knockoffs or stolen from a collection?”

Jennifer groaned at that. “Questionable. Maybe chemical and isotopic analysis of the metal in the weapons. Maybe we find something missing from current alloys.”

“What about the organic materials? The leather and wool, wouldn’t we be able to do carbon dating?”

She shook her head. “Do you know how that works? They measure the amount of carbon-14 isotope as a ratio to other carbon isotopes. Since carbon-14 decays at a fixed rate, the date that a carbon-based item was made can be estimated.”

“Uh...”

“Carbon-14 is a fixed percentage of carbon. It gets incorporated into living organic matter when it is made, like wool or wood. From that point on, the carbon level in the thing is fixed, but the carbon-14 starts to decay into nitrogen-14 through beta decay. Since we can test for the level of carbon-14, we can determine the ratio of carbon-14 to other carbon isotopes. The lower the amount of carbon-14, the older the item.”

“So...”

She picked up a knife in a leather sheath. “Say this sheath is eight hundred years old. Left alone for eight hundred years, the level of carbon-14 would have decayed to the level expected after eight hundred years. Instead, if it time-traveled to now, it still has the level of carbon-14 expected from a currently made leather sheath.”