The Last Voyage of the Nordstar
by David Barber
part 1
As a child, Einar Sokkasson saw an Imperial zeppelin burn.
In those days, his father captained the airship Nordstar, and Sigrid Njalsson, his second-in-command, was not yet grey. Flames reflected in his father’s eyes as he spun the wheel, uttering oaths to urge his own craft away from peril.
A dull glow had lit the interior of the zeppelin, a girdered ribcage with a heart of hydrogen fire. Sparks and blackened fragments swirled upwards and a plume of smoke had dirtied the sky. Einar watched as tiny figures tumbled silently through the air.
Njalsson had placed a heavy hand on the young lad’s shoulder and wondered if he would jump or burn. Sokkasson often asked himself that question, imagining it was a choice that each Northman must make, never guessing the world does not always let us choose.
* * *
Colonel Franks was growing impatient. They were off-course for North Dakota, and the Imperial Colonel suspected this Einar Sokkasson was pursuing some scheme of his own.
“We are too far north,” insisted the Imperial scientist at Franks’ elbow. “North Dakota can be reached more directly across the Great Lakes.” He proffered an ancient map by way of proof.
They stood in a long narrow cabin, glassed down one side, and by tradition called the chart room. From the Nordstar’s wheelhouse, they could hear Lars Thorsson calling out the geiger reading.
“By the count, twenty.”
One lad counted clicks, while another watched sand falling through an upended minute glass. Though wasting closer to death each day, Thorsson still insisted on speaking for the geiger crew.
Franks had instinctively avoided the man, as if his illness, the aftermath of a raid for machine parts in the ravaged lands of Britain was somehow infectious.
It had been Einar Sokkasson’s first voyage in command of the Nordstar, the beginnings of his reputation as an unlucky airship captain, men struck down with the bloody flux, combing hair from their heads in clumps.
Ignoring the skraeling’s map, Sokkasson spoke to Franks: “How many Imperial zeppelins have explored the Americas?”
True, the Imperium had its zeppelins, but it was only the steam-powered airships of Northmen that crossed oceans.
“By the count, thirty-five and rising.”
The airs of the blighted eastern seaboard were poisonous, and Northmen told tales of craft returning with no living man at the helm. Sokkasson’s father was famed for pioneering safer northerly routes.
“By the count, fifty—” Thorsson’s voice was lost in a fit of coughing.
“The Imperium paid you good silver,” resumed Franks.
“Yes, paid me to be Captain.” Sokkasson’s face bore an old scar that grew livid when he was riled.
The endless slicing of the air by the propellers filled the silence between them. In the darkness below, eastern Canada kept its secrets.
“By the count, twenty-five and falling.”
If Sokkasson felt justified, he did not show it. Before he turned to leave the wheelhouse, he questioned his grizzled second-in-command about fuel and water.
“And where shall I report to you, Captain?”
“Where I choose to be, damn you.”
“Polar easterlies, you see,” Sigrid Njalsson explained to Franks when they were alone. “Winds that blow down from the Arctic. Cold but clean.”
He took the Imperial scientist’s map and tapped the southern edge of the Lakes.
“Chicago and Detroit. Bombs fell all along there. The Captain keeps us safe.”
“Why did he not say this?” demanded Franks.
“The Captain is not an easy man,” admitted Njalsson, “but you can trust him.”
It was something so patently untrue that Franks could think of no reply.
As he often did, Sokkasson went to clamber amongst the rows of hydrogen gasbags inside the airship. In these dim, narrow spaces, the steady beat of the engines was strangely magnified.
Squeezing his bulk along the catwalks, the Captain met a crewman with a bucket of soapy water and a brush, looking for leaks.
“Captain.” The crewman pressed himself into a gasbag to give Sokkasson leeway.
Sokkasson was not a likeable man. Prudent souls learned not to cross him, though Northmen were not prudent by nature and Sokkasson had used his fists on crewmen before. The man watched the Captain’s large backside disappear up a ladder, then leaned and spat into the shadows below.
Guilt kept Sokkasson coming here. Hydrogen contaminated with air was cheaper, but more dangerous. This was something he had kept from the crew. The heft of Imperial coin would let him explore the Americas, besting his father’s voyages, but damning him in his own heart as a hireling.
* * *
Next morning, Franks was summoned to the wheelhouse.
Below them were mountains with edges sharp as chisels, each capped with snow, brilliant in the dawn light.
Njalsson pointed aft at a distant white speck, and Franks raised his binoculars to the Moorish craft. He turned accusingly to Sokkasson. “I thought we had lost them. You told me this.”
They had been followed since Iceland; two Moorish dirigibles glimpsed occasionally amongst the clouds. Franks knew that spies and collaborators had betrayed his mission, yet the Moors were still ignorant of his destination, else they would not need to follow.
The Captain bristled. “Moorish craft have gasoline engines. They do not paint the sky with smoke.”
Njalsson’s musings broke the angry silence. “There is no gasoline for them here. To make this journey, they must be laden with fuel.”
Captain Sokkasson steered them into a towering cloud bank, then immediately changed course and height. This trick had worked before, though this persistent Moor always found them out.
White fog pressed against the windows of the wheelhouse, and Sokkasson ordered the engines stopped. They drifted in unnatural silence as their propellers swung to a halt.
Njalsson and his Captain leaned from the wheelhouse, cupping their ears. The distant drone of engines grew louder. Then somewhere, another captain ordered his own motors cut and stood listening. When the cloud finally thinned, the Moorish dirigible was loitering below them.
“We have them!” cried Njalsson.
“You know what to do,” growled his captain, and the Nordstar stooped like a cautious hawk onto the blind top of the Moorish craft.
The crew knew their roles well, and grapples snagged the dirigible. When Northmen were not hired by the Imperium, they lived as raiders and pirates. Franks guessed they had executed attacks like this before, and not only on Moorish craft.
Winches hugged the Nordstar close in a violent embrace, and soon the boarding party had cut their way into the upper gantries of the Moor.
His mission was too important to be risked in a scuffle, yet to do nothing was beyond Franks, and he led troopers down the boarding ladder.
Njalsson strode the length of the gantry, ripping open gasbags — Moors were desperately trying to force their way up from the gondola — a Moorish crewman and one of his troopers ran at each other with pike and bayonet, and they toppled from the walkway together — Franks parried a thrust by a young Moor, who looked surprised before collapsing — revealing Njalsson, teeth bared in a fierce grin, a bloodied knife in his hand.
“Get your men back,” he panted.
Moors were scaling an internal ladder and Franks hacked at the topmost man, dropping him onto those climbing beneath. He glanced about, making sure none of his troopers remained behind, then clambered up into the Nordstar.
Once the grapples were cut, the Moorish dirigible fell away, engines raised in a futile roar, quickly lost in clouds and darkness.
Franks straightened his uniform and handed his sabre to a waiting trooper.
“Are they finished?” he demanded.
There was no way to replace lost hydrogen here. Njalsson thought of the Moorish crew and their crippled craft stranded in the wastes below.
* * *
Travelling westwards, the Nordstar floated over endless ridges covered with fir trees, its pale shape reflecting in blue circular lakes, until the mountains gave way to the cold, windy plains once called Manitoba.
Sokkasson brought them in to land, and they anchored in a turmoil of their own smoke and steam. Soon the crew were busy felling trees for fuel.
Franks had made it his business to learn about Einar Sokkasson, how some careless word had divided father from son, followed by recriminations that both believed true and in their pride neither would retract.
But when Sokkasson heard of his father’s illness of the blood — common now in the modern world — he had returned to demand the Nordstar as his birthright. Men had died before his claim was recognised.
Irritated by the Imperial Colonel’s presence in the wheelhouse, Sokkasson went to shout at his men, leaving Njalsson on watch.
Later, shots were heard outside and men were glimpsed running through the trees.
From the start, Sokkasson had forbidden loaded guns aboard the Nordstar. The hole from a musket ball could be patched, but it was the burnt wadding from the shot he feared. Staring through the glass of the wheelhouse at nothing, he had told Franks about an airship he’d once seen aflame.
A breathless trooper reported the strangers had got away.
“Most likely trappers,” said Njalsson. “Of no concern to us.”
“My troopers were ordered to take prisoners,” Franks explained. “For information.”
Njalsson shrugged. “Not worth making enemies.”
“Why should we care what these Americans think of us?”
“We might come back one day.”
Franks realised he had let his orders be questioned in front of one of his men. Belatedly, he dismissed the trooper.
* * *
In the end, Thorsson’s lungs failed him. A young voice rose in alarm. “It’s sixty, no, seventy and rising! By the count,” the boy added.
Sokkasson elbowed the helmsman aside and spun the wheel. Ponderously, they turned away from the line of old craters. When they had put the hot spot behind them, Sokkasson found Grand Forks on his geiger chart and carefully inked it in red.
The skraeling was explaining to Franks: “Clearly they were aiming for the military base near Minot, but the bombs fell short. This explains stories about Minot being a centre of government for a time.”
The Imperial scientist was so short he raised his chin as he peered through the glass of the wheelhouse. Featureless snow and tundra slid beneath them. To preserve their dignity, no one answered him.
South of the fort at Minot were circular concrete structures, stained with age and of uncertain purpose. Each was surrounded by a rusting fence that had caught fluttering scraps of plastic and rag like the ruin of some bleak carnival.
The airship chugged to a halt, propellers winding down and steam venting from its boilers. Franks dispatched troopers with the excited scientist to investigate, and they forced a rusting door leading down to an underground chamber.
Sokkasson had never learned patience and finally demanded to know what they were looking for.
“Imperial business,” Franks replied offhand, intent on the comings and goings of his troopers. “It need not concern you.”
Only Njalsson saw wrath darken his captain’s face and quickly looked away.
When Franks turned to speak again, Sokkasson stood with clenched fists, the scar livid on his cheek.
“We have them!” interrupted the scientist, reporting back. “Untouched, just as we hoped.”
Behind him, troopers strained at heavy canvas sacks.
He looked around the wheelhouse, from one face to another. “Is something wrong?”
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by David Barber
