The Brave New World - 144 The Black Widow

They moved forward stealthily, hardly making a sound, eyes and ears straining. The ground started to rise, but it was impossible to tell whether this was a mild swell or the beginning of a slope belonging to a mountain or a hill: the trees and the undergrowth were too thick to see beyond a dozen steps. Big stones, then rocks started appearing here and there, and Sven was struck by their appearance.

He raised his hand signaling the others to stop, and halted by a a couple of melon-sized stones. They were a shiny dark grey, with a jagged surface that had plenty of sharp edges. When he dropped down to his knee to examine one of them closely, he heard a clink as the pommel of the sword hanging by his side struck the stone. He glanced down at it and saw that it was sticking to the stone’s surface.

Magnetite! The richest iron ore there was! It made him hiss with excitement. The ore they were mining at Sellberg was hematite; it was very good ore with high iron content, but magnetite was twice as good. The newly captured settlement was even richer than he’d thought! No wonder its founders had made such swift progress.

He got up, brushing needles and crumbs of dried moss from his knee. He could feel the others watching him curiously. They would have to wait for an explanation; this was no time for talking. He signaled them to move, and as he crept forward among the trees, a new plan began to form in his mind.

The ground kept rising until it became a steep incline; then it suddenly leveled off. They all stopped again, and listened. The voices were quite distinct now; they were no more than thirty paces away. They belonged to two men bitching about someone called Theo. Theo was a lazy asshole. He was gone for far too long. He was likely fucking his brains out down in the village instead of hurrying back with the food. They were going to kick his ass when he got back.

Sven smiled to himself, and signaled the others to draw closer. When they were all huddled around him, he whispered:

“I’ve got a plan. They are waiting for the guy who took the ore down to the village. He was supposed to come back with food. They won’t be alarmed when they hear someone approaching. I want you to advance until you see those guys. When you do, stop and watch. I’m going back to the path, and I’ll simply walk in on them and order them to surrender. We’ll take all of them prisoner, if possible. I have a lot of questions that need answers.”

“But it’s going to be just you against three,” whispered Johan. Sven gave him a contemptuous glance.

“I can handle three veklingar like that with one hand tied behind my back,” he hissed. “And anyway, I’ll have the three of you ready to jump in if needed, correct?”

“You’ve got blood all over you,” whispered Jens. “They’ll see that.”

“What if they attack you?” Johan again. He was beginning to be a pain.

“Just do what Lasse and Jens tell you to do,” he hissed. Then he turned away from them and began to creep back towards the path.

He reached it quickly, it was just fifty paces away. He stepped out in the open, and ran a check on his appearance. The iron scales on his breastplate were smeared with blood. He stepped to the side, ripped up a handful of moss and gave them a cursory cleaning. Then he set out for the mine, walking confidently.

The miners heard him coming. One of them called:

“Theo, I’m really going to kick your ass hard! We’re dying of hunger here.”

Sven smiled to himself. We’ll see who kicks whose ass shortly, he thought. And hunger definitely won’t be how you die, assholes.

The final stretch of the path curved sharply around a huge grey boulder, so they didn’t see him until he stepped out into a small clearing littered with stones and rocks of all sizes.

He swiftly took in the scene. Two men in rawhide shifts reaching down to their knees; one was kneeling over a rock with a small pick in his hand, the other holding a crude hammer, standing next to the face of a cliff that featured a big ragged hole just above the ground. They were both staring at him with open mouths.

“Good day,” Sven said pleasantly. “So you’re the miners from that illegal settlement by the lake.”

They stared at him as if he was a ghost.

“You’re from the colonial administration?” the kneeling man asked finally. He got up, and Sven noticed he was gripping his pick very tightly. He grinned at him, and said:

“Tell your friend to come out of that hole. I’ve got something to say to all of you.”

He saw the man’s eyes narrow as he spotted the blood on Sven’s clothes. There had been too much of it to clean off.

“Axel!” called the man standing at the cliff face. “Come out! We’ve got an unexpected visitor.”

The man with the pick was staring at Sven’s legs. A lot of blood had crusted and fallen off on Sven’s journey to the mine, but what remained was more than enough to arouse suspicion. The man said:

“You’ve come from Edefors?”

“Yes,” said Sven. It was clear the man was referring to the captured village.

“Who did you talk to down there? Are you alone?” asked the man at the cliff face.

Sven looked in his direction and saw the third man emerge from the hole in the cliff on all fours. He was dragging a basket tied to his waist with a long leather thong, and immediately began complaining:

“I’m done for today. Olle, it’s your turn. My knees and elbows are completely raw. Who the fuck is this?”

He was staring at Sven. Sven said:

“That’s enough. I ask the questions around here.”

He raised his hand and drew a circle over his head. Lasse and Jens emerged from between the trees, with Johan following closely. Lasse’s bow was drawn and aimed at the man with the pick.

“Drop your tools,” Sven said. “You’re under arrest.”

“Arrest!?”

“You’ve been running an illegal settlement.”

“It’s licensed! We’ve got the papers to prove it!”

“You founded it a long time ago. It wasn’t licensed then. It was expressly forbidden to enter the New World without a license.”

“Ah, fuck off,” said the man with the pick. Sven nodded to Lasse.

Lasse’s bow twanged and the arrow hit the man in the back of the neck with a dull smack. Its head emerged just to the side of his Adam’s apple. The man swayed, and uttered a horrible gurgling wheeze before sinking to his knees with his hands clasped to his throat.

“He was so rude to me,” said Sven. He smiled at the two other miners, and said:

“Drop your tools. I’m not going to repeat it again. Drop them, and kneel down with hands over your heads.”

He turned to Jens and added:

“Finish him off.”

Jens stepped forward and there was a wet, crunching smack as he brought his ax down on the wounded man’s head. He toppled to his side and lay still.

It all became very easy after that. The two surviving miners were eager to answer all of Sven’s questions. They were survivalists, members of a club that gathered each Christmas for two weeks of self-inflicted misery in the wilderness. They came from all over Sweden – Lulea, Umea, even Stockholm – to a cabin they rented near Vuolerim, around forty kilometers southeast from Jokkmokk. They had celebrated the end of their survivalist exercise and New Year’s Eve at the cabin, and were to begin returning home the next day.

But the next day a terrible storm took place, and then a glowing cube appeared practically on the doorstep of their cabin. They investigated it, read the documentation, and decided it was literally a gift from heavens: the perfect chance to test their finely honed survival skills. So they took it.

Survivalists! So that was how they managed to progress so far so fast! They’d had the perfect training, the perfect skills to colonize the New World.

“You launched your colony from the cabin?” Sven asked Olle, who was crying by then, crying and sniffling like an old woman.

“No,” Olle moaned. “There’s this abandoned mine a few kilometres from Vuolerim. Very good ore, but there was a cave-in that killed a lot of miners, I don’t know, about a hundred or maybe even two hundred years ago. So it was abandoned. We thought that if the New World is a copy of Earth, there would be an iron ore deposit in the same spot. Or somewhere nearby.”

“And you were right,” said Sven. “Where exactly is this mine, back home? Does it have a name?”

“Six, maybe seven kilometers southeast of the town. You can’t miss it, it’s at the base of a big black cliff in the middle of the forest. They call it the Black Widow now, after all those dead miners. It used to be called something else a long time ago. But I don’t know what that was.”

Sven was silent for a while. Vuolerim was beyond Sonberg’s district, he knew that. He was operating on another governor’s territory. Well, that didn’t really change anything.

“What’s the name of your club?”

“Clan of the Brown Bear.”

A bunch of big children, thought Sven. Clan of the Brown Bear!

“Do you have any other settlements?”

“No, just Edefors.”

“How many of you are there?”

He questioned them for a few minutes more. When it became apparent they’d told him everything they could, he nodded to Jens.

Jens smashed Olle’s head with his ax while Lasse slit the other man’s throat with his knife, spraying blood. He fell on his face and started threshing on the ground.

“Finish him off,” Sven said to Johan.

Johan stood still, his eyes like saucers.

“Do it now,” said Sven, in a tone that promised punishment if Johan didn’t obey his order.

Johan wrenched his knife from its scabbard and started stabbing the writhing man in the back again and again. On the third stab, his knife jammed between the man’s ribs. He struggled trying to pull it out.

“That’s enough,” said Sven. “He’s dead now.”

He bent down and pulled Johan’s knife out of the body without showing any effort.

“You’ve destroyed a perfectly good shift,” Jens scolded Johan. “Why didn’t you stab him in the neck? You hit right in the middle just below the skull to break the spine, and it’s done.”

Sven saw that Johan was close to tears. He said:

“A beginner’s mistake. Let him be.”

He dropped to his haunches next to Johan and reached out, grasped his chin and turned Johan’s face to his. As he’d suspected, there were tears welling up in Johan’s eyes.

“Your knife,” he said, and pressed it into Johan’s hand. He let go of his chin, and smiled at him.

“Isn’t this more fun than a video game?” he said gently.

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