Fara i Viking - Chapter 13

Chapter XIII – Hrimthurs

While Berwald recovered Tino spent most of his time in the engineer's quarters looking after him, bringing him food and drinks and tending to his wounds whenever the bandages needed changing. Sometimes Peter would come in and sit with him, but the boy spent most of his time holed up in the room he now technically shared with Tino, though it was beginning to look like the two men might actually move in together.

Berwald lay on his stomach, stretched out so as to give the least irritation to the raw skin on his back. It was unbandaged at the moment while Tino checked on them. The little gunman sat on the edge of the bed, the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on applying ointment as carefully as possible to the healing wounds. When he was satisfied with his work he capped the small medicine jar and set it aside. "Alright, sit up and I'll get you some fresh bandages," he instructed.

The engineer did as he was told, cautiously pushing himself up first onto his hands and knees, then sitting back and crossing his legs. His movements were slow, wary of any motion which might cause him too much pain. When finally he was comfortable Tino came to sit behind him with a fresh roll of bandages.

"Y' don' have to keep doin' this," Berwald mumbled before Tino had a chance to start working.

"What do you mean?" Tino asked curiously.

"Y' don' have to take care o' me," Berwald elaborated slightly. "Y' can get one o' the others t' do it."

Hesitantly, Tino stared down at the bandages in his hands. Did Berwald not want him around? Perhaps he had misjudged everything. But Berwald had said he loved him that night. Maybe he had changed his mind and now he found Tino annoying. He had thought Berwald was pleased with their current arrangement, but the man's impassive face was so difficult to read that maybe he had gotten everything backward. "Would you rather someone else helped you? I can get one of the others if you want," he said quietly.

"S'not what I said," Berwald said, frowning in confusion. "Just thought there's somethin' y'd rather be doin' than takin' care o' me."

So Berwald did not want to get rid of him. That was a relief. "There's not," Tino assured him, and began unrolling the bandages so he could wrap them around Berwald's chest.

"There's not?" Berwald repeated.

"No," Tino confirmed. "I like it," he said, and nudged Berwald into lifting his arms so he could begin to wrap the bandages. "I like you," he added.

Berwald felt his face heat up when he heard that, and especially when he felt Tino's breath ghost against the back of his neck as the smaller man reached around his chest. "Y' do?"

"Yes," Tino said. "I like you a lot." He continued the repetitive motion of wrapping the bandages, leaning in each time he reached around Berwald's chest.

"Oh," was all Berwald could manage as a reply.

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Berwald was recovering slowly, but he was recovering. The slow speed most likely had something to do with the less than perfect medical treatment the crew was able to give him. But the burns on his back and arms were healing, while the bruises faded. He was conscious more often in later days and eventually able to sit up on his own. Tino happily announced to the others that he did not think the burns would scar too badly because they were healing quite well.

Because of his slow recovering, Aleksander did not bother to hurry them on their way to Asgard, their final destination. He let the ship float through the stars at a leisurely pace; never pressing the engine too hard while the engineer was out of commission.

It was a fortnight after they left Svartálfaheim before Berwald was on his feet again and Tino helped the tall man to walk slowly from his room to the galley, where Aleksander and Eiríkur cleared the sofa for him to sit down. By now all of his cuts and bruises had healed, leaving only the tender healing skin beneath the bandages on his back and shoulders to cause him pain. He was no longer very weak, but any quick or excessive movement would tug painfully at the healing burns, so he avoided movement as much as possible.

"It's good to see you up and around again," Eiríkur commented after Berwald sat down, and smiled a little as he watched Tino fuss over the large man, making sure he was comfortable before going to get him something to drink. Berwald only grunted in response.

"How are you feeling?" Aleksander asked.

Berwald grunted again, and accepted a glass of water from Tino, which he drank slowly before looking around the room and opening his mouth to speak. "Where's Peter?"

"Probably in my room," Tino replied. "That's where he spends more of his time. Do you want me to go get him?"

Berwald nodded his head slightly and Tino turned around, disappearing out the door and down the hall. Of course it did not take long for Tino to find the young boy and encourage him to come out to spend some time with the rest of the crew, particularly Berwald. He followed Tino into the galley, looking shy and wearing the same ill-fitting and stained clothing they had found him in, though looking a lot cleaner otherwise.

Peter held onto the back of Tino's shirt as they came into the galley, and eyed Mathias warily, too afraid to leave Tino's side until he spotted Berwald sitting on the sofa. Then he immediately went over to the engineer's side and climbed up to sit next to him. "Are you feeling better?" the boy asked softly. Berwald nodded slightly and grunted a reply, raising his hand to pat the boy on the head, tousling his dark blond hair. This made Peter smile, and the boy made himself comfortable sitting down next to the tall man.

"Need t' get y' some new clothes," Berwald said thoughtfully as he looked down at the boy. Peter had been wearing the same thing for at least a month, and almost certainly longer. They did not fit him properly and were threadbare, patched in places and torn at all the hems.

"Where are we supposed to get clothes all the way out here?" Mathias asked from across the room. And it was a good point, a surprise coming from the captain. They were out in the far reaches of the galaxy, an area only scarcely populated by humans, and traveling further from civilization every day.

"Well, when we get back then," Tino replied matter-of-factly. He came over to the sofa bearing a mug of coffee for Berwald and a glass of water for Peter and sat down with the man and boy. "Peter needs more than one outfit. And clothes that fit him properly, too."

Peter's eyes lit up when he heard this. "I can get new clothes?" he asked, looking back and forth between Tino and Berwald excitedly.

"Soon as we're somewhere we can get them," Tino confirmed for him. "We need to get Berwald some new glasses anyway," he added, and looked meaningfully at the cracked lenses sitting in front of Berwald's eyes. "That won't be for a while, though."

"I can wait!" Peter announced confidently. He was excited simply at the prospect of new clothes, and with how long he had been wearing these a few more months would not do him any more harm. The boy stayed with them the whole time Berwald sat in the galley. But it was only a few hours before Tino ushered the still healing man back to bed, ordering the others not to bother them while Berwald was resting.

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"You're really good with kids, Berwald," Tino commented when they were alone in Berwald's quarters.

"Y'think?" Berwald asked as he took up his now-customary position, seated at the head of the bed where he could sit up comfortably and rest against the wall.

"I do," Tino nodded, and flopped down beside him. "I mean, Peter seems to like you a lot. And back on the Chariot there were those kids… Who were those kids anyway?"

"J'st friends," the mechanic mumbled and gave a half-hearted shrug.

"Friends?" Tino looked at him curiously. Grown men did not usually refer to young children as their friends. "None of them were older than Peter."

Berwald just shrugged. "Still m'friends," he replied.

Getting Berwald to talk about anything he did not want to talk about was more painful than pulling teeth, so Tino gave up for now. It did not matter much, he supposed. Although, there was a lot about Berwald he still did not know, a lot which he would really like to know. There was much he did not know about the others, too. But the crew had an unspoken agreement not to talk about their pasts, as the gunman had learned shortly after his arrival. That was an agreement which Tino had been happy with until now, because he was finally starting to see himself as a part of this crew, a part of this family. And he wanted to know more about his family.

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The next day Berwald took his first look at the Hofvar's engines since his injury had incapacitated him. The engine had gone weeks without the constant maintenance he usually gave, and when he saw the state it was now in, Berwald could not help feeling guilty for having let it be for so long. He had brought this ship back from the dead in a junk yard; it was like a child to him, and he had neglected it.

He wanted to get back to work immediately. The whole room needed to be cleaned and so much more. But too much movement was still out of the question. Stretching pulled painfully at the fresh skin on his back, still thin and delicate over stiff muscles.

The engineer did what he could, though. He made sure everything was still in working order and that nothing needed to be replaced right away. Berwald was unwilling to trust anyone else performing this maintenance, though he allowed Peter to help in small ways; cleaning accumulated grease off the moving parts and tightening the occasional loose bolt. The mechanic's regular meticulous care for the engine was in all probability the reason it continued to function perfectly even when untouched for weeks. And even though he did not get to do all of the work he wanted before becoming so tired and sore that he had to stop, Berwald felt better having seen for himself that his child was still in good health.

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The clattering of footsteps coming down the catwalk toward the galley heralded Eiríkur's arrival before his face appeared in the doorway. As he looked in on the other three members of the crew his face belayed some of the excitement he felt. "You'll probably want to come see this," the teen said, and then disappeared again. Mathias, Tino and Berwald shared a curious glance between them before getting up and following him.

On the bridge, Aleksander sat in his usual place and Peter had stolen the copilot's chair, leaving Eiríkur to stand between them. They were all staring intently out the main window at something in the distance.

"What are we looking – Holy shit!" Mathias gaped when he realized what they had been called up for. It took a moment to distinguish from the stars, but the objects stretched out in front of them were not thousands of light years away, but only a few thousand kilometers. Asteroids; thousands of them. As far as the eye could see. "Wow, would you look at that," the captain breathed in amazement, leaning over the control panel to get a good look at the view. His eyes traveled up to the top of the window and he leaned forward to see as far up as he could, then as far down.

Hrimthurs was the largest asteroid belt in the galaxy. So large it effectively blocked off a huge portion of space, surrounding at least one, if not multiple solar systems; hundreds of light years high and hundreds of thousands in length. The area beyond it had never been explored by modern craft. There was simply no easy way to approach the thing from anywhere else in the galaxy if you wanted to get around it. The only option was to go through.

"I do not want to fly through that," Aleksander muttered. And no one could blame him. Flying through an asteroid belt was like flying through a mine field. One wrong move could send you crashing nose first into one of the asteroids.

"But we have to," Mathias eventually replied, pulling his nose away from the window finally to look back at his crew. They could not turn back now that they were nearly at their goal. "There has to be a way through it."

Eiríkur shooed Peter out of the co-pilot seat and resumed his usual position. "Well, if we believe the old legends, which have proved true until now, the Aesir traveled through this thing all the time. So either they had very good pilots, or there's an easier way through this."

"Can we just blast our way, through?" Mathias asked.

"No," Aleksander shook his head. "The debris from shooting any of those could be more dangerous than the asteroids themselves."

Which left only one option: try to fly through.

"How close together are they?" Mathias asked, trying to assess how difficult it would be just to fly through.

"A couple hundred meters," Eiríkur informed him. The teen's eyes were fixed on a set of computer readouts; doubtlessly the scans which were being made of the field.

"Well that's not so bad," the captain mused thoughtfully. "Hofvar's less than a dozen meters wide."

"They're also moving," Aleksander pointed out. "It won't be easy."

"Is there anywhere there are less of them?" Tino piped up. "Where it's thinner, I mean."

Aleksander shrugged. "Probably somewhere," he assumed, "It might not be anywhere near us, though. Eiríkur, see if you can find anything," the pilot instructed his brother, who was still focused on the computer screen. The teen gave only a nod in reply.

"How long until we actually reach it?" Tino asked. Years of space travel and he was still terrible at judging distances from within a ship.

The pilot thought for a moment, staring out the window, before he answered. "An hour, I think, until we have to worry about it. No more than two before we're in the thick of it." Not a lot of time for them to try and find somewhere else in the belt to try and squeeze their way through.

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Although Eiríkur ran scans for as long as he could there was no sign of any place in the asteroid field which was thinner or would provide them with an easier flight through. So they would just have to stick it out. "I know you can do it, Aleks," Mathias said confidently, patting the pilot on the shoulder. "You're the best pilot ever; you can get us through there."

Aleksander did not feel so confident himself, however. He gripped the controls with white knuckles as the asteroids drew ever closer to the ship. Huge chunks of space rock, each one larger than their entire ship. And not stationary. That would be too easy. Though held in place by the gravitational pull of something on the other side - possibly the star of Asgard's solar system - the asteroids were hardly locked in place, as with everything in space. They drifted slightly here and there, occasionally knocking against each other and sending themselves farther off course. This was what worried Aleksander the most. He knew better than the rest the maneuvering capabilities of this vessel, how fast he could pull out of the way of a drifting asteroid. But should one of them change course all of a sudden he might not be able to change their course fast enough.

They moved at a snail's pace past the first of the asteroids. Every single crew member was present on the bridge, which did nothing to ease Aleksander's fears, but rather made him even more paranoid about making a mistake. He was not the sort of person who liked to be seen making mistakes.

As they crept forward Mathias moved over to one window and peered out at the objects that passed them by. This change of position quickly proved to be a bad decision on his part. "Mathias get out of the way, I can't see if your stupid hair is blocking the window," Aleksander snapped without taking his eyes off the path in front of them. It was clear right now, but he knew it might not be for long.

Immediately Mathias hopped back like a scolded child. But as soon as the scolding wore off he rose a hand up to his head. "My hair's not stupid..." he whined softly, running a hand through the out of control spikes.

"Yes it is," Aleksander argued. "Now shut up and let me fly this thing." And for once Mathias did as he was told without argument.

Beside Aleksander, Eiríkur had his eyes fixed on the computer screen, reading out the constant scans he was running as the objects around them constantly changed position. With no visual beyond the one window, the only way to avoid asteroids on all sides of the ship was to track them through the ship's sensors. While the pilot watched their path forward with eagle eyes, Eirikur made sure they remained safe from the asteroids at their sides and back. Occasionally he would read out a warning that one of the rocks was coming too close and Aleksander would pull them out of the way ever so slightly, still moving forward at as deliberate a pace as possible. It was slow going, and the crew waited with bated breath as they crept through the field.

"There's something weird about these asteroids," Tino said after a while.

No one else had been paying much attention to the asteroids, except to make sure none of them hit the ship, but Tino's comment changed that. Though Aleksander and Eiríkur continued to concentrate on flying them safely through the belt, the others turned their attention to the objects in question.

There was, in fact, something strange about them. It was not obvious at first. Like any space debris the asteroids were chipped, cracked and dented from knocking into each other and anything else that might get in their way. But looking past those damages revealed something much more interesting. "They're all the same size," Peter pointed out first.

"They're perf'ctly round," Berwald discovered next.

That drew even Aleksander and Eiríkur's attention. "You're right," the pilot breathed, staring intently at the asteroid closest to them.

"But that's impossible," Mathias argued, although he had also noticed this by now, and it was impossible to deny. "Asteroids are just space debris, they can't all be the same unless…" And he trailed off, a look of confusion and amazement on his face as he figured it out.

"Unless they're man made," Tino finished for him.

"You can't possibly think that's true," Mathias argued. "You can't just make an asteroid belt."

"We can't," Tino agreed. "But look at that," he gestured out the main window toward the debris. Floating aimlessly around them was all the necessary proof. Perfect cookie cutter stones meticulously carved and set in place. "That's impossible. There couldn't possibly be this many asteroids all the same naturally. Someone had to make them that way, it's the only explanation."

"But who could have done something like this?" Mathias asked. And that was the real question. How was it possible, and who would have the technology to perform such a feat of galactic engineering? This was not an asteroid belt. This was a wall.

"Asgard?" Berwald suggested. That was the only logical explanation. This belt had been here for as long as Humans had been traversing the stars. If it had been built it had to have been before. Thousands of years ago. The only other civilization in the galaxy that came even close to having the technology and skills necessary for such a feat was Asgard. Furthering this theory was the fact the asteroid belt effectively blocked the Asgard solar system off from the rest of the galaxy. But then that begged the question of why the Aesir thought it necessary to wall off their entire solar system.

As far as anyone knew they were the most technologically advanced race that had ever lived. And if the Hrimthurs belt was of their making it only proved that fact. What could they have wanted so badly to keep out? Or to keep in, for that matter?

The implications were both amazing and terrifying, and the revelation thrust the crew into an uneasy silence. Distracted by thoughts of what sort of civilization would build, and feel the need to build, something like this, Aleksander did not notice one of the stones was heading straight for them. Tino spotted it first, looming toward them at a steady speed, and when he realized that Aleksander was not pulling out of the way panic shot through him, "Look out!" he shouted, pointing toward the asteroid.

Aleksander's eyes shot toward it and then widened in shock. "Shit," he muttered through gritted teeth and wrenched the controls to the side. It sent the ship lurching aside with enough force to knock Mathias off his feet. As the captain scrambled back to his feet Peter grabbed onto Berwald's shirt, eyes wide with fear as the ship became still again.

"Careful!" Eiríkur scolded, "We almost hit on the port side."

"I know!" Aleksander snapped, on edge from their near hit, and pushed the ship forward again. "Shut up and let me do my job."

"You're doing great, Aleks," Mathias said, trying to lighten the mood and sooth frayed nerves. He patted the pilot's shoulders supportively and stared out the window over his head. "Just keep going."

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It took the better part of the day to get through the asteroid belt at the deliberately slow pace at which they moved forward. Thanks to Aleksander's expert piloting they had emerged relatively unscathed. When finally the ship was free and far from the nearest asteroid the crew breathed a collective sigh or relief. There was momentary celebration, for navigating the belt had been no easy feat.

"I knew you could do it Aleks," Mathias grinned and clapped the pilot on the shoulder proudly. If Aleksander was similarly proud of his navigation it did not show on his face, though Eiríkur had cracked a small smile when Mathias turned to praise him as well.

But even though they were free from the immediate danger of the asteroid field Aleksander did not bring them up to speed again. They were now in uncharted territory. There were no maps of this system. Star charts showed nothing but blank space beyond the Hrimthurs belt.

Tino asked the obvious question on all of their minds. "So what do we do now?" One could not just wander through space hoping to stumble across a planet. He did not receive an immediate answer, though, because none of the others were quite certain either.

"We'll run some long-range scans," Aleksander eventually decided, "And see if they can pick up any stars." The Hofvar's sensors were weak compared to those of newer and larger ships. But with the asteroid field at their back their area of focus was narrowed significantly. "We should be able to pick up the solar radiation and at least get something to aim for." Then, once they were closer to a star system, the scanners would be able to pick up on the planets.

"Right," Mathias nodded and patted Aleksander's shoulders again. "Get on that, then." The pilot replied with only a nod and leaned forward to reach the main control panel, where he began pushing buttons and flipping switches to get the more powerful sensors up and running.

Now all of the excitement was over. It made the daunting breach of the asteroid belt rather anti-climatic. After breaking through they were faced with the same mind-numbingly monotonous expanse of empty space, stretching on for as far as the eye could see, and farther. Already bored again, Peter left the bridge and went off in search of something to entertain himself with.

"So, uh, how long do you suppose this will take?" Mathias asked. Patience had never been his strongest suit, to say the least, and sitting around with nothing to do was his least favorite part of space travel.

"I really could not say," Aleksander replied without taking his eyes off the control panel in front of him. "It will take as long as it takes."

"Great," the captain sighed in annoyance and then turned on his heel. "Well, you know where to find me if you need me," he said, and tossed a wave over his shoulder as he strode off the bridge and out of sight. Tino, Berwald and Eiríkur watched him go.

"You might as well go with him," Aleksander commented after a moment. "It's going to be boring up here for a while."

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End Notes:
The wall that surrounds Asgard was built by a Hrimthurs, one of the giants that inhabit Niflheim. Because the wall does not have a name I could easily steal, I used this to name the asteroid belt.