The Voyage of the Iron Dragon by Robert Kroese

Author:Robert Kroese [Kroese, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Culain Press
Published: 2019-01-09T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-nine

Camp Yeager was shut down in October, before the new mine ever produced an ounce of coal. After the ship carrying Osric was tailed from Scotland to Normandy, the Committee decided maintaining the mine was too big a risk. Svartalfheim had enough coal to survive the winter, if they stopped using coal for anything other than heating and doubled the occupancy of the better-insulated buildings during the coldest weeks of the winter. Surviving the next winter was another matter entirely.

Winter in Iceland was like being on another planet. High temperatures hovered around freezing, with less than five hours of daylight. With the coal shortage stopping most outdoor work and the oil shortage making it impossible to use torches and lanterns, the inhabitants of Camp Yeager were going to have to spend nearly all their time indoors for at least five months. Bodies produced heat, meaning that the more people they packed into a building, the less oil they would need, but there was a limit—both physical and psychological—to how many people could coexist in a given amount of space for five months.

When the first buildings at Camp Armstrong were constructed, the plan had been to heat them with geothermal energy. This, however, had proved unworkable. The land nearest the underground magma deposits that powered the machinery in Hell was largely unsuited for building, as it was rocky and unstable. Thus most of the buildings were a quarter mile or more away from the heat source, requiring heat to be pumped long distances through insulated pipes. This would require so much labor, and so much heat would be lost in transit, that in the end it was decided that coal—which was in ready supply at Camp Yeager—was a better solution.

Pleiades’ reliance on coal was always going to be temporary, and the process of converting to fuel oil for heating had been underway for some time. With the shutdown of their only coal mine, this process was accelerated. Alma’s engineers had already built a small refinery which would purify petroleum and separate it into gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, lubricants and other materials. Before the refinery could do them any good, though, they had to have something to refine.

The engineers had designed the furnaces to be capable of running on a variety of oils, from thicker vegetable oils to thinner fuel oil derived from petroleum. In case of a petroleum shortage, they could rely on vegetable oils, more readily available in medieval Europe, as a stopgap. When the coal ran out in March and no word had yet been received from O’Brien’s expedition, it was looking likely that a stopgap solution would be needed to get them through the next winter.

The problem, as with many issues facing Pleiades, was one of scale: it was almost impossible to buy the amount of vegetable oil Svartalfheim would need to get through the winter. Eirik’s men could spend all year combing markets in towns along the Mediterranean for palm, olive, and coconut oil, and still not gather enough.

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