... wait, was that a knock on the door? In the middle of winter, nobody would go any place unless absolutely necessary, or at least scheduled way in advance. It must be one of my neighbors with some kind of an emergency!
Barbro hurried to open the door and see who was outside - only to find Algot standing there, complete with duffel bag and a rather sheepish grin. Barbro's "what happened!?", rather than ushering Algot in first, betrayed a still-lingering suspicion that there was some sort of disaster behind it all nonetheless.
"Yeah, well, Icelanders, in a nutshell ... I'd prefer to elaborate inside, though." A couple moments later, they were sitting in front of the oven, the fire freshly stoked - and two logs added to it so as to last through an elaborate explanation.
"So ... Icelanders, you said? I doubt that they came all the way here to interfere with you directly?"
"Of course not! They've been talking to the brass in Mora instead. They did that in person, though, bringing a crate or two of historic documents to prove their point. The conclusion being that while we might be able to build Habakkuken, we wouldn't be able to send anything remotely resembling a Hangarfartyg, or having the same chances of success."
"Huh? You know my thoughts about the first and the last step, but what brings those eggheads to the conclusion that after having a ship built, Sweden wouldn't be able to sail it out to sea? Sure, it'd take a fair lot of people to man it, but ..."
"And those sailors need to eat. A large part of the documents the Icelanders showed were to compare the ancients' maritime registers with the post-Rash scouts' reports from their ports, to demonstrate that only those that had just replenished their supplies and had one or two years' worth of stock are not found to still be sitting in their home ports as rusty shipwrecks. Like, in this photo Mora's envoy brought us to see for ourselves."
Algot pulled out a print of a photo a scouting ship had made of a shipwreck, some large port of the ancients visible in the background. An oddly-shaped, but huge bow stuck out of the waters at an angle, revealing only "KY3H..." in orange letters for an identification.
"... ah. I see their point, the crew we could get together, but then equipping the ship with years of provisions in advance ... with the higher failure rate of the preservation methods available to us, compared to the ancients ... Say, since the Icelanders brought lots of documents, as you say, do they have any idea how many of the ancients' Hangarfartyg Eftervärldsresan ever found the safe place they were searching for?"
"Not that Mora would have told us in turn, why?"
"I can't quite get past the fact that we never heard back from any of them ..."
"No, of course not. You know how it is with radio communication."
"Of course. But they had a ship to begin with, so why wouldn't they eventually have had a look how things had turned out back home?"
"Ah! Sorry, no, they wouldn't have had that anymore. In order to get a settlement started on land fast and with restricted resources, they very likely would have had their ship stranded and repurposed into sort of a BYO fortress. Apparently sailors have been doing that sort of thing for centuries when necessary, in the times before the ancients had enough ships to effectively be ready for SAR missions wherever in the world a ship turned missing."
"... no way back, no second try when the first place turned out to be ... not so suitable?"
"Nope."
"Ooff. I shall add that to my list of reasons not to support new Hangarfartyg missions ... in case that the Icelanders still didn't manage to kill the concept dead enough. So, I take it that you're back to stay?"
"For the rest of winter, you mean? Yeah, no other big plans to pursue right now, if ever," it came from the freshly resurrected sheeping grin on Algots face.
"Alright then, husband," Barbro replied and picked up the decoration she had worked on when the knock came, "God Jul, and I think this one'll look best hung above the entrance!"
