1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  “Are you aware of what’s going on in Russia?” Vladimir asked, after he sat down.

  Stone resumed his own seat. “I think so, at least in broad outlines. A powerful nobleman named Sheremetev tried to supplant Czar Mikhail by placing the czar under what amounted to house arrest. But he escaped, with the aid of the American Bernie Zeppi and Russian associates of his, and is now setting up what he claims to be the legitimate government of Russia in a place called Ufa that’s far to the east. I think it’s close to the Urals although it’s not in Siberia. And…that’s where things stand at the moment. So far there hasn’t been much military action but that’s bound to change before too long.”

  He shrugged apologetically. “I’m afraid I haven’t delved into any more detail than that. We just don’t have that much business with Russia and I’m constantly preoccupied with more immediate matters.”

  Vladimir had no trouble believing that. Ron Stone was the middle one of the three sons of Tom Stone, the man who had founded Lothlorien Farbenwerke. But Tom was not well-suited by temperament to be a businessman and preferred devoting his time to teaching. So, initially by nothing more complex than a process of elimination, his son Ron had wound up running the business instead. His older brother Frank was off being a revolutionary in Italy and the younger brother Gerry had devoted himself to becoming a Lutheran pastor.

  It soon became evident, however, that Ron had a natural aptitude for the work he was doing. Brandy had told Vladimir that she thought it was because Ron had been raised a hippie and still pretty much had that mindset. For him, making money was a purely practical affair with no emotional baggage that got his ego tangled up in the process. Whether she was right or not, the one thing that was now clear was that Ron Stone—a man who had just turned twenty-one years of age—was the very capable chief executive officer of the world’s largest and most profitable chemical and pharmaceutical company.

  “What it all comes down to is this,” said Vladimir. “For the moment I am cut off from a large part of my family’s wealth. I don’t expect to be permanently cut off from it, but it could happen. Meanwhile, I’m not going to be receiving the goods I have promised to deliver, giving me a serious cash flow problem and I am considerably overextended. A mutual friend suggested I have a talk with you about it.”

  “Yes. He wrote me about it.” Ron said. “I think I can help, and because our friend gives you good references, I’m inclined to. But I’m not running a charity.”

  Vladimir opened his briefcase and pulled out documents detailing his level of ownership in various projects. Vladimir wasn’t a great businessman. In fact, he wasn’t even a very good businessman. But he had had three things going for him over the last few years. He started out rich, Grantville was a boom town, and Vladimir had a spy network. It was focused on political and technological intelligence, but business intelligence fell right between political and technological. So he had acquired a fair amount of financially useful information over the years. There was also the Dacha, which had until very recently been sending him regular updates of what they were doing and what they had learned. Between those advantages, the disadvantage of not having an abundance of business acumen had been swamped. So Vladimir’s portfolio was both large and diverse.

  In exchange for a carefully selected quarter of that portfolio, and agreements in regard to the data that they both hoped would be available from the Dacha, Ron Stone provided the cash that Vladimir needed to make good his debts.

  CHAPTER 2

  Outpost

  Ufa, Russia

  July 1636

  Olga Petrovichna went into the tax warehouse with her slate and her charcoal stick. Her worthless husband was supposed to be doing this, but Stanislav Ivanovich Polzin was drunk again. He was usually drunk by noon and it was late afternoon now. Olga sighed. She had long since regretted marrying him, even if he did have a secure post and the family connections to keep it.

  “Look up there!”

  Olga looked around, even before she identified the voice. It was Sergei Sergeevich, one of the Streltzi. It took her only a moment to recall that he would be on guard in the west tower.

  She went out the door again, and looked up to see Sergei Sergeevich gesturing at the sky, still yelling. She followed his pointing arm and saw a whale flying through the sky. For a moment she was sure it was a whale. Not that she had ever seen a whale, but her grandpa—who had been a sailor—told her about them. Then, as she watched it, her memory caught up with her. There were stories from back west about great flying machines. And the whale had markings. In fact, it had the imperial crest clearly visible on the bottom of the thing. And it was coming right at them.

  Olga wondered how Sergei had failed to see it till it got this close. Maybe because it was silent. Then she heard a faint noise. The thing wasn’t silent, not quite, but it was quiet.

  Olga turned back to the tax warehouse and yelled, “Someone go to the tavern and get my idiot husband! Mother Russia has remembered we’re here.”

  Bernie looked down at the scurrying people in the town of Ufa. “I wondered when they’d notice us.” Bernie felt like he had wandered into a western movie. Fort Apache, maybe. But in any case, it looked like one of the movies that had the wooden stockade surrounding the buildings. A high budget technicolor movie, the sort where the camera zoomed in from on high. He was looking down at a western fort with a town next to it, with just enough Russian bits to make him feel off about it all. The fort was vaguely rectangular, with four watch towers, a bunch of one- and two-story log cabins, and one stone church. Just to the east of the fort was a ramshackle bunch of log cabins, all single story and not overly well made. To the south about three hundred yards were the docks on the Belaya River. The Belaya River was about three hundred yards wide at this point and twisty as all get out. Fort Ufa was on the south end of a loop of river. From looking at the land and where the forest ended, Bernie figured that, come the spring floods, the river was going to come almost up to the fort. It was located as near the docks as they could get without flooding every spring.

  “It’s not their fault,” Czar Mikhail said. “Who looks up from a tower? You watch the horizon, or the woods.”

  “Prepare to drop anchor,” shouted Colonel Nikita “Nick” Ivanovich Slavenitsky. He was the commander of the Russian Air Force by personal appointment of Czar Mikhail. The crew made preparations, then a weighted spear with a line attached was dropped from the bow of the dirigible. It fell a hundred yards and landed in the mud next to the river, sinking several feet with the force of its fall. It was a stopgap measure to use if you didn’t have proper dirigible docking facilities.

  A few minutes later, the dirigible was tied down, at least marginally, and lowered enough so that the passengers could debark by means of a rope ladder. For children—of which there seemed to be many—and cargo, they would use nets.

  “The first thing we need is firewood,” Bernie Zeppi said.

  “Why?” asked the woman who was apparently the wife of the commander of the garrison, such as it was: thirty Streltzi, who spent their time taxing the fur trade.

  “The steam engines on the dirigible. A dirigible is a lot safer in the air under power than it is tied down in the open. And you don’t have a hangar for it.”

  “Besides, we will want to use it,” Czarina Evdokia explained. They had discussed this on the trip from Bor. One of the very nice things about traveling by dirigible was the comfortable ride. There was plenty of room to move around and the ride was mostly smooth. You could talk and pace. You could spread maps out on tables and plan campaigns. You could talk about propaganda and medicine and all manner of things. And they had. They had even had breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the dirigible.

  “How much wood?”

  “A lot, but we have steamboats coming with people and equipment. We are probably going to end up deforesting a good part of the surrounding territory, both because we need the wood and because we need clear sight lines.”

  “
For now,” Evdokia explained, “Ufa is the capital of Russia.”

  Bernie looked over at Natasha and smiled. There had been time to talk on the trip here, if not a lot of privacy. They were going to be forging a new Russia here. A Russia where a commoner like Bernie could marry a princess like Natasha. There had been time to talk, but no room to be alone. That was going to change now that they were here. No matter what Evdokia said. In fact, she hadn’t said they couldn’t be married, just that Bernie’s rank was still an issue.

  In the air over Russia

  Nikita Ivanovich Slavenitsky—Nick, according to Bernie Zeppi—looked out into the night sky. It was dark, really dark, and cloudy at nine hundred feet. He couldn’t see a thing. The Czarina was cruising along at half speed, and Nick was guessing about the wind so they, by this time, might be as much as a hundred miles off course in any direction. Unlike the Test Bed, the Czarina was a real dirigible, with a large carrying capacity for an airship and a large crew. He had spent a couple of days after arriving in Ufa restocking the Czarina with wood for her boilers, then Czar Mikhail sent them to the Swedish fortress, Nyenskans, on the Baltic coast with letters to everyone from Gustav Adolf to Brandy Bates.

  The Czarina, assuming they weren’t headed for the north pole by this time, should reach Nyen sometime around noon tomorrow, having left Ufa early this morning. They were running light with the extra weight taken up by extra wood and water to extend their range because the condensers were not exactly perfect.

  Petr Nickovich, his executive officer, came up to him with a cup of tea. “How does it look, Skipper?”

  “We might as well be on our way to Mars for all I can see,” complained Nick.

  “I don’t think they have fog in space, Captain,” said Petr, who had been a braincase at the Dacha before transferring to Bor to take over the construction of the dirigibles. He had calmed down a lot and had volunteered to be part of the crew of the Czarina. Pete knew more about the Czarina than anyone alive, but he didn’t have a command mind. On the other hand, he had proven excellent with managing the details of shipboard operations. The Czarina had a crew of twenty-six. Nick was the captain, Petr his executive officer, and the chief engineer. Directly in Nick’s chain were his rudder men and the second and third watch pilots. Under Petr were the engineers, electricians, and riggers. The engineers ran the boilers, the engines and condensers. The electricians ran the generators, the radio, the electric lights and phone system. The riggers did just about everything else. There were also a cook and cook’s assistant, and four maids.

  “Go to bed, Skipper. Let the midwatch handle things.”

  “I think we ought to go up another five hundred feet,” Nick said.

  Petr looked over at the barometer. “I don’t know, Captain. We don’t actually know how high we really are. All we have is the barometer. It’s not like we have a radar range finder. We might be higher than we think.”

  “Or lower.”

  “I doubt it, not at these temperatures. But if you want, we can pump some more hot air into the balance balloons.” The Czarina got most of her lift from hydrogen-filled lift chambers, but it had two large hot-air lift chambers, so that it could adjust lift without dumping either ballast or hydrogen. Adding more hot air to the hot-air lift chambers would increase their lift, and as they went up the hydrogen chambers would expand, increasing their lift more. It was a positive feedback loop that, if handled wrong, could lift them high enough so that the hydrogen chambers would start to vent. That was dangerous. What they would have to do was increase the heat in the hot-air chambers; then, once they gained altitude and the hydrogen chambers expanded, they would vent from the hot-air chambers to compensate for the increased lift of the expanded hydrogen chambers.

  “Call Valeriya and get a read first,” Nick said.

  Petr went over to a wall of the gondola and closed an electric switch.

  Valeriya Zakharovna was climbing a ladder next to the left central lift chamber when she heard the bell ringing. She climbed down the ladder, wondering what it was about officers that they wouldn’t let a woman work. It took her a minute and a half to climb down to the phone. “Able Airwoman Zakharovna here,” Valeriya yelled into the mouthpiece. The phones on the Czarina were about on a par with the phones of Alexander Graham Bell’s day.

  Then she stuck her ear against the earpiece and heard a very tinny voice say, “Have a look at the cells and tell us their level of expansion.”

  “Aye aye.” Valeriya racked the mouthpiece and went back to the central lift chamber. When they had been moored, the chambers had been about three-quarters full. As the ship got higher and the outside air got thinner, the gas in the hydrogen chamber expanded, filling the chamber the rest of the way. Now they were about eighty-five percent full. She could tell because there were markings on a pole, and she could look across from where she was standing and see the marks. The highest mark she could see was the eighty-five percent mark. She went back to the phone and pushed the switch that would make it ring on the bridge.

  “Eighty-five percent, sir,” she yelled into the phone.

  The bridge acknowledged and she got back to work.

  “I don’t know. We go up another five hundred feet and it’s going to be at ninety-five percent and we’ll need to vent hydrogen to come down, even if we kill all the heat to the hot air chambers,” Petr said.

  “Take us up till the hydrogen chambers are around ninety percent,” Nick said, “then set the hot air chambers at minimum heat. That should put us on a gentle glide down from around fifteen hundred feet. It ought to be light before we get back down to this height. And don’t forget the engines and the vanes. We can use power to force ourselves down if we have to.” The Test Bed had taught them all a lot about how to build airships, but this was still the first ship of this size and they were finding major differences in performance. The Czarina was much slower to respond than the Test Bed had been, and Nick hadn’t thought that was possible.

  “Right, Skipper. We will do that and I’ll have Valeriya call us to keep us up to date on the hydrogen chambers.”

  Nick held up his hand. “Right, Pete. I’ll go to bed.”

  They came out of the fog around ten the next morning and could see the southern shore of Lake Onega in the distance. They were a good three hundred fifty miles east of where they were supposed to be and well north of where they expected to be at this point in the trip. Nick had the Czarina turned just south of due east, and they sighted Nyen just before sunset.

  Along with its electrical system, the Czarina had a spark gap radio, with the spark kept well away from the hydrogen. Once the fort was in sight, and while staying well out of firing range, Nick gave the pre-prepared messages to the radio operator. “Send this one first,” he said.

  “Aye aye, sir.” The operator started tapping in the Morse Code taught at the Dacha.

  GREETINGS FROM MIKHAIL CZAR OF RUSSIA STOP REQUEST PERMISSION TO LAND AND DELIVER MAIL FOR GRANTVILLE AND BEYOND STOP

  The response was:

  CZAR ON BOARD QUESTION STOP

  NO STOP CZAR SENDS GREETINGS STOP A LOAD OF MAIL FOR USE AND GUSTAV OF SWEDEN STOP

  There was a considerable delay before they got any response. But, eventually came:

  YOU CAN LAND STOP PUT DOWN TO THE EAST OF NYEN STOP WE WILL SEND A TROOP TO MEET YOU STOP

  They found a place to drop the anchor, and reeled themselves down to where they could use the winches to lower the mail bags. They lowered the ladder and Gerry Simmons climbed down.

  Gerry looked around and saw a Swede with a captain’s bars on his collar sitting on a horse about thirty yards away. Apparently the captain didn’t want to put himself under the dirigible. Gerry walked across the pasture to an easy speaking distance, then pulled out his documents. “I’m Gerry Simmons, ambassador at large from the Empire of Holy Rus, appointed by Czar Mikhail day before yesterday.” He held out the papers with a flourish and a grin. “What have you folks heard?”

  The captain look
ed at Gerry and at the dirigible, then got off his horse and walked over to meet Gerry. “Director-General Sheremetev is saying that the evil wizard, Bernie Zeppi, has cast a spell on Czar Mikhail, and you and Nurse Tami are in on the spell.” The guy said it as though he wanted to sound like he was joking, but wasn’t really sure that it wasn’t true.

  “Nope. Bernie couldn’t do that. Neither could my wife. What happened was Sheremetev put Czar Mikhail up in a hunting lodge out in the back of beyond, while he took over the government. Then Bernie and Princess Natasha showed up in Bernie’s Dodge.” Gerry stopped at the man’s apparent incomprehension. “Car? APC?”

  The captain nodded at APC and Gerry went on. “Anyway, it became apparent that some of the oprichniki had orders to kill Czar Mikhail if it looked like he was going to get loose. That sort of pissed Mikhail off.”

  The captain snorted a laugh. “It would piss me off too. On the other hand, wasn’t it sort of to be expected?”

  “Maybe. But since Sheremetev was going to kill him anyway, Czar Mikhail went ahead and called Sheremetev a traitor and started the revolution…or counter-revolution, or whatever it is. My wife and I, and two of our sons, were at the hunting lodge where they were keeping Czar Mikhail and his family, and we didn’t want to be there when Sheremetev showed up to find Czar Mikhail missing. So we went along too.”

  “Do you want to go back to the USE?” the captain asked.

  “Honestly, it’s tempting. Or it would be if my wife and boys were along on this trip, but she’s in Ufa playing doctor. Not just to the czar, but to the whole town.”