865 AD, The Fjords of Norway.
Ragnar stood on the edge of the rocky shoreline.
Just a month ago, he had been sitting in a climate-controlled office in Seattle, staring at CAD drawings for a high-efficiency cargo vessel. He was a Senior Industrial Engineer and Naval Architect.
Now, he was Ragnar, the eighteen-year-old bastard son of Ulf, the chieftain of a village.
"Coffee," Ragnar whispered. "I would kill a dragon for a single cup of lukewarm instant coffee."
"Stop muttering to the spirits, boy."
Ragnar turned to see his father, Ulf, stomping down the frozen mud path. Ulf was a mountain of a man, with a beard that looked like a bird's nest made of steel wool and eyes that were constantly narrowing in suspicion.
"I wasn't speaking to spirits, Father," Ragnar said, switching seamlessly to the guttural Norse dialect. "I was thinking about the ships."
Ulf stopped beside him, looking out at the cove. Three longships bobbed in the freezing water. They were beautiful in a savage way, and built for speed. But to Ragnar's engineering eye, they were a nightmare of inefficiency.
"The King sails in thirty days," Ulf grunted, crossing his massive arms. "The Great Army gathers. We sail to England. We take their gold. We take their land. That is the way."
Ragnar suppressed a sigh. The Viking business model was terrible. It relied on high-risk venture capital (raiding) with a terrifyingly high turnover rate (dying).
"Father," Ragnar said carefully. He knew he had to tread lightly. As a bastard son, his standing was only slightly above the village goats. "Look at the village. Look at them."
He gestured behind them. Huts with thatched roofs huddled together against the wind. Smoke rose lazily from the central longhouse, but the people moving between the buildings looked thin.
"Winter was hard," Ulf admitted, his voice dropping an octave. "The harvest failed."
"Exactly," Ragnar pressed. "We are starving. If we take all the able-bodied men to England, who fishes? Who hunts? Who repairs the roofs before the next snow?"
"We bring back gold," Ulf snapped, defensive now. "Gold buys grain."
"Gold doesn't eat," Ragnar countered. "And dead men don't bring back gold. If we go to England, half of us won't come back. The village dies slowly while we die quickly."
Ulf turned, his hand resting on the hilt of his axe. "And what do you propose, Engineer?"
He used the word like an insult, though Ragnar had only used it once to describe himself during a fever dream when he first woke up in this body. Ulf thought it meant some kind of wizard.
"We don't invade England," Ragnar said, his heart hammering against his ribs. "We supply them."
Ulf stared at him. "Supply the English?"
"No," Ragnar shook his head quickly. "We supply the King. Look at those ships, Father. They are standard Karves. Good for coastal raiding, terrible for deep ocean transport. The King needs to move thousands of men, horses, and siege equipment across the North Sea. He doesn't need more warriors with rusty axes. He needs logistics."
Ulf blinked. "Logistics. Another wizard word."
"Capacity," Ragnar corrected himself, pointing to the nearest ship, the Sea-Wolf. "I can make it carry double the cargo without losing speed. If we show up with a ship that can carry twice the supplies, the King won't send us to the front lines to die. He'll pay us to ferry his army."
Ulf looked at the ship, then back at his son. For a moment, the rough chieftain mask slipped. Ragnar saw a tired leader who was terrified that this winter would be the end of his bloodline.
"Double the cargo?" Ulf asked quietly. "Without sinking?"
"I swear it on my life," Ragnar said.
"Your life isn't worth much, boy," Ulf grunted, but he turned back to the village. "You have three days. If you ruin the ship, I'll throw you in the water and let you swim to England."
Ragnar marched down to the makeshift shipyard.
"Sven!" Ragnar yelled.
An old man with one eye and a back bent looked up from a pile of oak planks. Sven was the village boatbuilder.
"The bastard screams," Sven cackled, spitting a wad of tobacco onto the sand. "What do you want, little wolf?"
"We're pulling the Sea-Wolf out of the water," Ragnar announced, grabbing a charcoal stick from a fire pit nearby. He walked over to a smooth piece of driftwood and began to sketch.
Sven hobbled over, squinting at the drawing. Ragnar was drawing a cross-section of a hull.
"You want to widen the beam?" Sven asked, his good eye narrowing. "She'll be a tub. She'll drag in the water like a pregnant cow."
"No," Ragnar said, his mind racing through buoyancy calculations. "We're flattening the floor amidships and sharpening the entry at the bow. We change the displacement curve."
Sven looked at him blankly.
"We make the bottom flatter in the middle," Ragnar translated. "More room for crates. But we make the front cut the water sharper. And we change the rigging."
He sketched a new sail plan. The traditional square sail was great for running downwind, but terrible for tacking. Ragnar couldn't introduce a full triangular lateen sail yet it would look too alien and get him burned for witchcraft. But he could introduce a spar-bowline. A simple spar that would allow them to tighten the luff of the sail, letting them sail closer to the wind.
"If we do this," Ragnar said, tapping the wood, "we can carry forty men and supplies for a month, and we'll still outrun any other ship in the King's fleet."
Sven scratched his beard. The old man touched the charcoal drawing.
"The wood will groan," Sven whispered. "The stress on the keel..."
"We reinforce the keel with an iron shoe," Ragnar said. "I saw the smith has scrap metal. We plate the bottom of the keel. It makes the ship more stable."
Sven's eye went wide. "Iron on the keel? To stop it from rotting on the rocks?"
"And to keep us upright when the wind hits," Ragnar grinned. "Are you with me, old man?"
Sven grinned back, revealing three brown teeth. "It's madness. Ulf will skin us."
"Ulf is desperate," Ragnar said, looking toward the longhouse. "Desperation is the mother of industry."
It took two full days for the fragmented memories of the original Ragnar to merge with his own.
Ragnar didn't sleep. His body, younger and stronger than his old one, fueled him, but the labor was brutal. They hauled the Sea-Wolf onto the sand using log rollers. Ragnar stripped off his tunic, working alongside the thralls and the freemen, swinging an adze until his hands blistered and bled.
"Careful with that pitch!" he roared at a young Viking named Leif, who was slathering the waterproofing tar too thickly. "Too much weight! We need a thin seal, not a blanket!"
He introduced the concept of the assembly line, albeit a primitive one. Instead of one man cutting a plank and then fitting it, he had three men cutting planks to a template he created, while two others specialized in sanding them down. Efficiency. It was the religion of the 21st century, and Ragnar was its prophet in the 9th.
By the evening of the second day, the village had gathered to watch. The Sea-Wolf looked different. It sat differently on the sand. The belly of the ship was fuller, the lines sharper.
Ulf came down at sunset.
He walked around the ship, running a callous hand over the new iron-shod keel. He looked at the modified mast step, which Ragnar had reinforced to take the higher strain of the new rigging.
"It looks... fat," Ulf said bluntly.
"It's voluminous," Ragnar corrected, wiping sweat and sawdust from his forehead. "We launch at dawn."
"And if it sinks?"
"Then I won't have to worry about the King's war," Ragnar said dryly.
Dawn brought a crowd.
Ragnar stood by the bow. He was exhausted. He had done the math. Archimedes principle doesn't change just because we are in the Dark Ages, he told himself.
"Push!" Ulf commanded.
Fifty men heaved. The Sea-Wolf groaned, the wood protesting the movement, and then slid over the greased logs. It hit the water with a splash that sent freezing spray over Ragnar's face.
It sat high in the water, despite the heavier frame. The iron keel acted perfectly as a counterweight, stopping the aggressive rolling that usually plagued these ships.
"Load it!" Ragnar ordered, stepping into his role. "Bring the rocks!"
They didn't have cargo yet, so they used rocks to simulate the weight of supplies and warriors. Men carried heavy boulders on board. Pile after pile. The ship sank lower, but the waterline held steady exactly where Ragnar had marked it with charcoal.
It held twice the weight of a normal ship, and it was still buoyant.
"Get the sail up!"
The wind was coming from the North. Usually, a Viking longship would have to row against this.
The sail unfurled a patchwork of wool that Ragnar had restitched himself. He grabbed the new spar-bowline, hauling the leading edge of the sail tight.
The canvas snapped, filling with air. The wood creaked.
The iron keel held the line. The ship surged forward, cutting through the chop.
A cheer went up from the beach. It started low, confused, and then grew into a roar.
Ragnar stood on the deck, feeling the vibration of the ship under his feet.
Ulf was waiting when Ragnar brought the ship back around, steering it expertly toward the dock. The chieftain looked at the pile of rocks on the deck and then at the speed with which they had returned.
Ragnar jumped off the bow, landing in the shallow water. He walked up to his father.
"We have a product."
Ulf looked at his son, really looked at him, for the first time in years. The disappointment was gone, replaced by a calculating gleam.
"The King needs ships," Ulf muttered, his mind finally catching up to the economics. "He needs to move grain. He needs to move iron."
"And we," Ragnar said, pointing to the shivering villagers, "are the only ones who can build these. We don't need to raid England, Father. We're going to sell the King the means to do it."
Ulf clapped a heavy hand on Ragnar's shoulder, nearly buckling the engineer's knees. "Very well, boy. We sail for the King's assembly in two days."