Chapter Text
The vacation was not starting out well. When Uncle Trond offered the chance to go into the Silent World for three weeks in the off-season instead of sitting at home and training recruits or repairing gear, he had not mentioned the ten-day journey — each way! — by ship. Sigrun Eide had only learned of this after she'd already volunteered, when her best friend, Dagny Eide, pointed out that she was going to spend nearly half her vacation on a ship.
Granted, Uncle Trond had gotten her a cabin instead of a bunk in the hold, and, if she had to admit it, a few days lying down had done wonders for her injured neck. But after that … none of the other passengers spoke Norwegian; they appeared to be monolingual Icelanders. Most of the crew were the same, though the mess hall staff spoke Danish, which was somewhat intelligible.
“Where's the stairs to the top deck? I want to watch for grosslings.”
“Top deck? Gross…lings?” There was a quick discussion in Icelandic amongst the small crowd of servers who had gathered, before Emilía Jónsdóttir continued. “Oh. No. You cannot go to weather deck. Passengers are not allowed —”
“I'm not a passenger. I'm a troll-hunter, and I know there are grosslings, that's trolls and beasts, Rash monsters, in the seas.”
“Um, no one is allowed on weather deck. Crew are not allowed. It is dangerous.”
“Of course it's dangerous! There are grosslings, and I can't fight them from here!”
Another discussion in Icelandic.
“People on weather deck attract monsters. But there are few monsters here. Navy ship is nearby. We are safe if no one goes on weather deck.”
“But —!”
But there was no appeal. All Sigrun could do for the rest of the ten-day journey from Dalsnes, Norway, to the Öresund base was pace around the enclosed observation deck, glare out the reinforced windows at the empty ocean, and regale the mess hall staff with tales of troll hunting. Strangely, the other passengers seemed to leave the mess hall when they saw her flaming red hair through the door, though the off-duty crew would congregate to listen, those who were better at Danish translating her stories for those who spoke only Icelandic.
Still, it was a journey of crushing boredom. Even training recruits would have been better.
“We reach Öresund base,” Emilía told Sigrun. The server was out of breath, having run up the stairs and across the observation deck to tell her. “Come, watch this side.”
Just coming into view in the late winter morning, the Öresund base was amazing, quite the largest modern construction Sigrun had ever seen. A forest of steel towers supported multiple multilevel platforms, each level extending several meters further out than the one below, so that the topmost levels merged to form a single vast platform. Heavy chains linked several floating piers to the towers. To the east and west, pre-Rash bridges extended into the foggy distance, separated from the base itself by steel drawbridges, now raised.
Rather than tying up somewhere, the ship dropped anchor near a pier from which a rowboat set out to greet it. Finally allowed on the weather deck with two ship's cats and half a dozen armed crew members watching, Sigrun climbed down a rope ladder to the rowboat, her backpack and rifle slung over her back.
“Welcome to the Öresund base,” one of the two men rowing the boat said in Danish-accented Norwegian. “General Trond is here; he's meeting with other people but he'll come talk to you pretty soon. We have quarters arranged for you and, hmm, let's see … Oh! And the rest of your team will arrive in two days. I'm Lukas and I'm to show you around. Noah there doesn't speak Norwegian and doesn't like people anyway.” The aforesaid Noah looked up at his name and grinned before returning his attention to his oar. As Sigrun extended the back of her hand for the cat sitting between the men and wearing a Class B collar, Lukas added, “That's Eydis. We've got about a dozen Class Bs on the base, and three Class As.” Eydis deigned to touch Sigrun's hand with her nose before settling back to watch the surrounding waters.
“Not enough cats for such a big base, really. My clan's got more than that.”
“The base is entirely cut off from land with the drawbridges up, so we only have to worry about sea monsters. And you see” — he gestured up at the massive structure — “there's only a few places anything small could crawl up, and we just need a few cats to watch them. A leviathan could attack, of course, but we don't need cats to notice that!”
“Does that happen often? A leviathan, I mean?” Sigrun hadn’t gone into the seafaring side of troll-hunting, as it usually lacked the honor of chopping the foe’s head off. However, bored stiff as she was from the journey, she would have welcomed the excitement of hacking the tentacles off an attacking leviathan.
“No, no. There hasn't been one since I've been here, at least, and that's six years now. They don't come into these shallower waters much.”
“Guess there's not much chance of that then,” Sigrun said glumly, and Lukas grinned at her.
The conversation was interrupted as the rowboat reached a pier, Noah climbed out and tied it up, and Lukas and Sigrun followed. First Eydis and then the three humans climbed a steep metal staircase — very nearly a ladder — to an open catwalk which led to a closed steel door. Noah tugged on a handle attached to a wire threaded through a tiny hole in the wall next to the door and shouted something in Danish. The door swung slowly open, revealing a third man who allowed the three to pass before pulling the door shut and barring it with a heavy steel bar.
Lukas introduced the third man as Karl and, leaving Eydis to make herself comfortable in a cat-bed beside the door, the four proceeded up a stairwell lit by dim artificial lights. Having seen such lights before, on a troll-hunting expedition in Sweden, Sigrun refrained from gawking at them. She took some satisfaction in the men's expressions of slight disappointment. As with many men, she looked down on them a bit both figuratively and literally, as she was a very tall woman at 184 centimeters (a full six feet tall in the measures long forgotten since the coming of the Rash).
The lowest level of their platform featured crates and boxes stacked here and there among the steel towers supporting the higher levels; a freight elevator, its floor currently flush with the floor of the platform, showed how the supplies had been brought in. The sides of the level were open to the weather but heavily barred, with netting stretched across the bars to keep birds from nesting within. The air smelled of the sea, but not quite the sea as Sigrun was accustomed to it at home. Seagulls called outside, and waves lapped against the towers a dozen meters below. The footsteps of the four rang on the steel floor.
“Where's everybody else?” Sigrun asked, halting and looking around.
Stopping to look at her in alarm, Lukas answered, “General Trond just told me to meet you. I don't know of another ship.” He turned to ask the other two something in anxious Danish.
“No, no, it’s just this place is so empty. I can hear a couple of work parties, there and over there” — she pointed to areas from which sounds of work echoed — “but this place is obviously built for a lot more people. I thought this was a navy base, but it’s almost abandoned.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Lukas turned to reassure his comrades in Danish before returning to Norwegian. “Well, we built this place over decades to support the reconquest. The reconquests. It was built big enough for the army to stage out of. But after Kastrup, the whole effort was abandoned and so was the base, pretty much.” He too looked around at the echoing emptiness. “We're just a skeleton crew maintaining it so it doesn't rust away because, you know, we could never build it again. It's built out of oil drilling platforms, and the ones we didn't take, or you Norwegians didn't take, are all wrecks now. We have to maintain this, or give up our homeland forever.”
Sigrun shrugged. Lukas' explanation was rather more than she'd really needed, though she did understand the need to maintain any pre-Rash technology that any nation happened to have in good shape. With the world (so far as known) having a total population of less than a quarter million and all lands outside of the small safe areas being infested with ravenous monsters, there were severe limits on their resources and what they could make for themselves. Denmark was the most resource-limited of the five surviving nations. Iceland had its entire island; Sweden, Norway, and Finland were gradually taking back their parts of the European continent; but Denmark was reduced to the single small island of Bornholm, over 150 kilometers from the Danish homeland.
“Yeah, okay. So, you're supposed to show me around. What is there to see in this place?”
“You want to see the tanks? Before, uh, before Kastrup, the army drove or towed a bunch of pre-Rash tanks here for repairs. Most of them weren't ever repaired in the end because … you know. We take care of them and keep them from rusting, though, so they'll be available when we try again. Your team's supposed to get one of them, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. Let's see them. I'll pick out a good one while we wait for Trond!”
Noah and Karl stayed behind while Sigrun followed Lukas up another steep staircase … and another … and another. “We don't use the elevators except for freight,” her guide explained as he led the way up yet another staircase.
“It's okay. We climb mountains in the off seasons. Skiing, you know.”
“Ah, I hadn't thought of that. Well, here we are!”
“Here” was the top platform, open to the sky. Ordinary wooden-frame buildings stood in an orderly layout, recognizable as barracks, mess hall, administrative buildings, and so on. Lukas led Sigrun south to a long shed built along the west side of the platform, open on the east, away from the sea. Within were a line of vehicles, the most massive Sigrun had ever seen, the tracks alone standing higher than her head.
Gazing up at the barrels of the main guns, thinking out loud, Sigrun mused, “These are great. One shot from that thing would take down most giants. We should get some for the clan. Except …” She stared at it for a long moment. “This thing's so wide, it'd have to smash its way through the trees. That kind of noise would draw trolls from all over. Firing that gun would too. This thing would get swarmed as soon as it left the settlement! It doesn't have enough guns on the sides, so we'd have to have hunters on foot to defend it. But with all that noise … they'd be better off without it!” She turned to Lukas. “We can't take one of these into the Silent World.”
The Danish soldier was watching her with a slightly awed expression. “Uh, yeah. That's pretty much what we think happened to the Danish Army back then. Their soldiers weren't immune so they were getting sick and maybe turning, and the noise drew more and more grosslings, and finally the soldiers just abandoned the tanks, or died inside them … there were a lot of those. We could use them properly; that was the plan for the reconquest, but … Anyway, you're not getting one of these big ones. Come here and see yours.”
The tank assigned to Sigrun's team was tracked like the others, but far smaller than the first she'd seen and lacking the big gun, or any gun, to be precise. It was less than four meters wide, about ten long, and about four high. The interior was divided into two parts: a small rear compartment, empty at the moment and accessible only through double doors at the back since a divider had been crudely welded across to partition it off; and the main compartment, divided into a large sleeping or living area, a tiny office, and the driving compartment. There were five bunks, three attached to the divider, and the other two on the wall to their left, all folded up out of the way for travel. The opposite wall was all cabinets.
After prowling around inside for a few minutes, Sigrun nodded at Lukas. “As long as it's quiet, this'll do fine.”
“It's quiet,” her guide assured her. “Everything's been greased and tightened up. But it's, well, it's old and … old. It should be good long enough for your expedition, though.”
That wasn't as reassuring as he might have hoped, but Sigrun was willing to accept it. They went together to the barracks, which were larger than they needed to be, so she had a choice of several lower bunks, after which they repaired to the mess hall for a late lunch.