The Brave New World - 145 The Deadliest Disease

Sven walked back to the village a few steps behind the others, deep in thought. He had several problems to solve.

From time to time, his gaze fell on Johan. He wasn’t sure if the therapy he’d administered earlier had worked. Well, if Johan didn’t get a grip, he’d have to go. From the New World, and from Sven’s farm back home. Weakness was a highly infectious sickness. Weakness in the New World meant death. He wasn’t going to have Johan infect the Viking colony.

His second problem was that he had to leave a garrison in the newly captured village. That meant at least half a dozen men. And he was short on manpower as it was. Svenborg, Sellberg, Rikruva, Jula, Groenstad, Frihetsgrind – the Viking empire already had six settlements. Each of these was already short of hands. Sven had to make numerous sacrifices when he assembled his raiding party, reconcile himself to the thought there would be a meaningful drop in production. Twelve men equaled nearly ten percent of his available workforce.

And now, he’d acquired yet another settlement that needed at least a dozen colonists. No, twenty, that was the minimal population. He had to make sure half of them were women. That was the best way to keep things stable: make sure everyone had someone to fuck. Deprived of sex, people quickly grew angry and rebellious.

It wasn’t an original thought – back on Earth, governments came to a similar conclusion half a century earlier. A few years before the catastrophe, there was even talk of legalizing copulation with animals. However, the animal rights lobby and anti-rape activists nixed that. They argued that sex with an animal was okay only if the animal gave its informed consent, and enjoyed the experience. There was no way to obtain the former, and no way to confirm the latter. So the whole project was shelved, to the great disappointment of zoophiles around the world.

Sven made sure none of the Vikings were zoophiles or indeed of any but the standard sexual orientation. He accepted only heterosexual males and females, and this applied to both worlds. He had no prejudices against people of any sexual orientation, but heterosexual males were more aggressive, and Sven wanted his Vikings as aggressive as they could get.

Aggression was the driving force behind humankind’s dominance on Earth. Aggression was what got people out of bed in the morning, and drove them to action. Aggression discovered new lands, created new inventions, made people rich. People who didn’t have the drive to assert themselves were subhuman. They deserved to be exploited, and to have their asses kicked at every opportunity.

That had always been Sven’s credo, a belief reinforced by being shared with some prominent psychologists. It had served him well, and made him rich.

Of course, it was an investment in the future. Their kids would eventually grow up, and begin to contribute. But in the meantime they would need to eat, and to be cared after. That was always the problem, whatever one did there always was a price to be paid. People who weren’t aware of that ended up paying the original price plus interest, interest that grew bigger as time went on to the point where it eclipsed the original cost.

Sven knew all that. He was a thinker as well as a doer, which was why he was president of the Viking Motorcycle Club and Emperor of the Vikings in the New World. But his ability to think well carried a price too: it made him aware of more problems than he wished to deal with.

And stuff like what to do with Johan, or how to split up his already insufficient workforce was minor, really. Because the most important problem was when to move the capital of his empire to the captured settlement.

He had to move it there from Svenborg, that was for sure. It was the most well-developed of all the settlements in his domain. Before their death, the miners had told him the lake was teeming with fish, and that there was a large herd of reindeer roaming the area. There were two salt licks and a salt spring within a day’s travel and there was the mine, with top quality iron ore mixed with smaller quantities of other metals useful for creating a variety of iron alloys. There were plenty of mushrooms and berries and wild roots and grasses that yielded grain. Most importantly, the village was situated on a waterway that led directly to the sea.

He had a lot of planning to do; it was a big move. And so he stayed silent, walking by himself, until they arrived at the village and of course a new shitload of problems immediately descended on his head.

” You found that mine? That’s great,” Henrik said. “But in the meantime, a bunch of those guys showed up. They had been out hunting, they brought back a wild boar and a couple of deer – extra food for us! But they were armed and tried to fight and when it was clear they’d lost, their controllers back home pulled the plug.”

“They removed their implants and killed them?”

“Yes. You were lucky to get those miners alive.”

Sven grunted in assent, and went to examine the corpses. There were five, all armed with bows and knives and throwing spears. He pretended to look at everything very closely, hiding the fact that he was boiling with rage. The miners had lied to him! Well not exactly lied, but they hadn’t told him about the hunters, which was just as bad as an outright lie.

Sven knew this was because he’d treated them well. He hadn’t tortured them. If he had cut off a couple of fingers and gouged out an eye, they’d have told him about the hunters, too. He was guilty of weakness, the very disease he fought so hard to prevent.

He wouldn’t be making this mistake again in the future. It was that fucking Johan, he’d infected him. Sven decided he’d remove Johan’s implant when he got back home, and kick him out of his farm.

“You had no chance to question them at all?” he asked Henrik, pretending to examine the bow lying next to a corpse whose face had been turned into chopped meat.

“None. I mean we got a couple alive, but the moment we started the interrogation they dropped dead.”

“Fuck,” said Sven. “I hope everyone kept their mouths shut.”

“We did. They don’t know anything about us, or where we came from.”

The bow was quite well made, almost as good as Lasse’s. It made Sven angry.

“Fuck,” he said again. Straightening up, he kicked the corpse and said:

“Strip those losers, and bury them with the others. Why the hell haven’t you collected their weapons? Did you count how many of those guys we got in the village?”

“Fifteen. We thought you’d want to examine the scene as is, Sven. You always insist on leaving things untouched until you’ve had a look.”

“Yeah. How many women among the fifteen?”

“Uh, hang on… Nine. Definitely nine. And six kids.”

“There are at least a couple of women from that settlement somewhere out there,” Sven said. “Who knows, there might be more, and some guys as well. You’re sure that you got every single man in that bunch here, that none escaped?”

“Hundred percent. We set up an ambush like you told us to, and they walked right into it.”

“Good,” said Sven. “But there still are others out there. I can feel it.”

Henrik knew better than to dispute Sven’s feelings; he stayed silent.

“I need to eat something,” Sven said eventually. “Make sure those bodies are gone and get rid of at least some of this fucking blood. And send a couple of scouts out, we don’t want any more surprises. They can come back in a few hours when you’ve cleaned up here.”

“Sure,” said Henrik. “There’s good smoked fish in the warehouse. There’s even some bread.”

Sven stared at him.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” he said finally.

“No. We’ve found both stone and iron querns. Almost everyone had their own personal handmill for grinding grain.”

“Maybe they had a field or two going somewhere nearby,” said Sven.

“No. Not nearby. We had a look. No fields, but we discovered a few patches of wild oats and barley. Oh yes, and there’s a fisherman’s hut and a smokehouse about a kilometer along the shore. You know, that path where we found fish scales.”

“Empty?”

“Yes. No one had been there for at least a couple of days, from the looks of it.”

“Post a lookout there,” said Sven. “I have a feeling someone might be coming up that path soon.”

“Hey, Sven,” called out Lennart.

Sven turned and saw Lennart approaching. He waited until Lennart stopped beside him, then said:

“Keep your voice down, you fucking fool. There might be people we don’t know about within earshot. Wait.”

He turned to Henrik.

“Run along and tell the others to keep quiet, too,” he said. “And get going on those fucking corpses. I want everything pristine yesterday. Move, man.”

When Henrik had gone, Sven asked:

“What do you want, Lennart?”

Lennart looked unhappy. Clearly, he had been expecting a friendlier Sven. He said:

“I’ve made a rough inventory of all the loot we got. It’s a lot, Sven. It’s a fucking lot. Those guys have been really busy.”

“So it would seem,” said Sven. That was it! The village would become his new capital. He would need to decide by the end of the day whom he would move here. A messenger sent out tomorrow wouldn’t reach Svenborg for at least a week. It would take Olaf at least another week to assemble and send out the people needed, a third week or more for them to arrive… And winter was coming, winter was just around the corner.

There was no time to waste.

“Grab this guy’s feet,” he told Lennart, pointing at the corpse.

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