1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  Meanwhile, the Catherine the Great was mostly built. It was the talk of Hamburg. The Catherine was the new icebreaker. They were following the new Russian tradition of naming ships after royals, but they had decided to go with up-timer Russian royals. It was a compromise. Vlad had wanted to call it the Brandy and have “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” as its theme song. That was when Brandy threatened princeocide.

  Vlad had several meetings with Ron Stone on what to take. Latest word was that they could make primers, even in Ufa. They considered sending rifles, but copper was the issue. There was now some copper production in Russia, but it wasn’t enough for a brass cartridge industry. Besides, most of the copper production was in territory controlled by Shein, not Czar Mikhail. That meant that for now at least, Russia was going to be staying with the reloadable iron chambers of the AK series. Instead, Vladimir would be sending breechblocks for cannon, the new vacuum tubes that were just starting to be produced, litmus strips, catalysts, tube boilers, plus a host of other bits and pieces that could be the core of war production and industrialization.

  In Russia, the rivers had frozen into roads. General Birkin and the army of western Russia were on the march from Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan.

  CHAPTER 17

  Kazan

  December 1636

  Nick looked out the window at the other dirigible. There wasn’t much he could do about it. The Czarina wasn’t armed except for the crew’s personal small arms, and he doubted that the Alexis was either.

  Nick was headed for Kazan to scout the position of Birkin’s army and he figured that the Alexis was heading for Ufa to sneer at Czar Mikhail.

  Ufa

  December 1636

  “It’s back,” Mama said.

  Alexis looked at his mother, then at his father, and fought back tears. They had talked about this. And, in fact, it was his begging that had kept his papa from shooting at the Prince Alexis the last time it had come over Ufa. “Do we have to?” he asked.

  Papa nodded. “Every time it comes here, it makes Director-General Sheremetev stronger.”

  “I’ll do it then,” Alexis said fiercely.

  Papa looked at him for a long minute, then nodded. Slowly, Mama, Papa, and Alexis left their apartment in the Ufa kremlin and walked out to where the rocket men were manning the rockets.

  Alexis looked up at the dirigible that bore his name and warned it one last time. “Land!” he shouted in his seven-year-old soprano.

  The dirigible didn’t land.

  Alexis turned to Petr Fedorovich, who commanded the rocket men. “Shoot it down!”

  Petr Fedorovich barely even looked at Papa before turning to the men. “Fire.”

  Several dozen rockets flew into the sky. Whoever was in command of the Prince Alexis was being overconfident. They hadn’t considered that more effective antiairship weapons might exist than rifles and cannons. Even good land-based antiaircraft weapons could be negated by simply flying high enough. In the world the up-timers came from, German dirigibles bombing England had been quite safe as long as they stayed ten thousand feet above the ground. It was only after the English developed airplanes with machine guns capable of firing incendiary rounds that the German airships started suffering serious casualties.

  Czar Mikhail and his forces didn’t have any airplanes, much less ones capable of firing incendiary bullets. Even the USE didn’t have any yet. But they had developed weapons which—with a bit of luck and some recklessness on the part of the enemy—had a chance of shooting down airships at low altitude.

  The rockets had no guidance mechanisms whatsoever. Nor did they have contact fuses. Their fuses were as primitive as it gets—basically, the warhead was ignited when the fuel burned through to it. They were really best suited for area bombardment against land-based enemies.

  Even with as big a target as an airship flying less than two hundred meters above the ground all but seven of the forty-one rockets missed the Prince Alexis entirely. Of the rockets which did strike, four simply bounced off the taut fabric skin, barely leaving a scorch mark. The other three managed to puncture it, but one of them uselessly over one of the hot air bags and one of them whose warhead went off too soon, after it had just penetrated the fabric. It tore a rent in the skin but did no more damage than that.

  The last rocket, however, punched through the skin and into the forward hydrogen cell. The hole let hydrogen and oxygen mix and the rocket’s warhead went off at the right time. The front of the dirigible jetted flame. With three cells, two hot air and one hydrogen, losing their lift, the Alexis nosed down. The engines couldn’t compensate and the dirigible fell to earth in a slow motion crash.

  If the reporter who exclaimed “Oh, the humanity!” at the crash of the Hindenburg had been there to see it, he might have said something sounding shocked. But the seventeenth century was a hard-bitten century. And Russia was a hard country. So, aside from some cheers at their good shooting, no one in Ufa was particularly upset.

  Not even seven-year-old Prince Alexis, not really. Yes, it was his dirigible, named after him and everything. But it had failed to land when he told it to. So it had gotten what it deserved.

  Across the river, the herd of goats that had to run for their lives as the crippled Czar Alexis crashed into their field were less sanguine about the matter. But no one was asking their opinion.

  Nor were they asking the opinion of the men on board. The Czar Alexis carried a crew of twenty-three and could have carried twice that number. Instead it carried extra fuel, charcoal soaked in plant oils and alcohol which, by good fortune and good design, didn’t catch fire. Most of the crew survived. A dirigible crash can be a slow thing, and people had time to brace themselves. Only seven members of the crew died in the crash and two more died of damaged lungs because they had been working next to the front hydrogen bag. A hydrogen fire is a hot fire. And inhaling burning hydrogen is deadly.

  Lev Ivanovich survived the crash with only a broken arm. He was in the left engine car of the Czar Alexis. The body of the airship had absorbed the blow and it wasn’t till the left engine car broke off the dirigible’s main body that it was dropped. But that drop flung him into the radiator, which was how he broke his arm and burned it too. Broken arm or not, he knew the danger if the boiler blew so he was screaming at Lyubim Borisovich before they had stopped moving. “Open the release valves! Open the release valves!”

  Lyubim looked at him in confusion for a moment then seemed to come to himself. He tried to stand on the tilted floor and managed to reach up and pull the lever that released steam from the tube boiler. That was in addition to the automatic pressure release valve which would, in theory, release the pressure if it got too great. The automatic pressure release valve had been working fine this morning, but Lev was in no mood to take chances.

  Lev would learn later that the other engine car had ended up under the body of the airship and all the crew in it had died. It hadn’t blown up either. The crash had smothered the fire as well as the crew and the steam in the boiler had never reached a pressure to cause an explosion.

  Ufa kremlin, three days later

  “In one way it’s a total loss,” Petr Nickovich said, looking around the room. Czar Mikhail, Czarina Evdokia, Princess Natasha, and Bernie Zeppi—not to mention Yuri Alekseyevich Dolgorukov, who had just been made the head of the Air Bureau—were in the meeting. Also present were Crown Prince Alexis, his older sister Irina, and little sister Anna. “At the least it will never fly again. On the other hand, with the knowledge of the Hindenburg, the skin of both the Czarina Evdokia and the Prince Alexis were treated with fire retardant chemicals and it appears to have paid off. Not so much stopping the airship from burning, but at least keeping it from going up like Bernie said the Hindenburg did. Still, the front hydrogen bag is gone and the front hot air bag is too. The middle forward hydrogen bag is badly scorched and I’m honestly surprised that it didn’t go up. The aft portion of the airship is in better shape, if not good shape. All the bags were r
ipped in the crash and at first it seemed likely that fire would spread. But, probably because of the locations of the rips, the escaping hydrogen failed to find a spark.” Petr was amazed at that. The Alexis could have just as easily gone up entirely. “Aside from the tears in all the gas bags which, except for the ones that burned, should be repairable, there is the damage to the superstructure. Airships are not designed to withstand hard landings. There isn’t a ring that isn’t broken in at least two places. The gondola and both motor cars are badly damaged.”

  “What about the engines themselves?” Bernie Zeppi asked.

  Petr had to smile at the amount of up-time science the up-timer had learned since he had come to down-time Russia. “They came off surprisingly well. Some fittings will have to be replaced, but they can be repaired.”

  “So you can fix my dirigible?” asked Prince Alexis and Petr smiled again.

  “Not exactly, but there are enough parts to help us build a new one.”

  “The Princess Irina,” declared Princess Irina, “which is what it should have been in the first place.”

  Seven-year-old Crown Prince Alexis started to cloud up, and Petr lost all thought of smiling. Getting caught in the middle of a fight between royal siblings wasn’t something to warm the heart of the wise bureaucrat. “We can use the Czarina to take the parts to Dirigible Valley and they ought to cut six months to a year off the time it will take us to build the next one.”

  “The Princess—.”

  Crown Prince Alexis kicked his older sister.

  “Alexis!” Czarina Evdokia said sharply.

  “Papa, he kicked me!” Princess Irina complained.

  “Quiet!” Czarina Evdokia said, and there was quiet, even if it was leavened by baleful looks from the older children. “If you don’t behave, it will be the Princess Anna.”

  “Yay! I get a dirgabul!” proclaimed six-year-old Anna.

  Bor

  December 1636

  Arkady, the radio operator in Bor, had the newest high speed recorder on his radio set, but it was only good with synced messages from other stations with the new system. What he was getting from the Czarina Evdokia was Boris Ivanovich clicking keys. The message came through clear enough. The Czar Alexis was down and Boris sent a list of dead, injured and captured. Arkady jotted it down as it came in and was yelling for little Petr before the message was finished.

  As might be expected, the radio was attached to the dirigible works, so the casualties were friends and acquaintances of the radio operator. So was Boris Ivanovich, who was clicking out the message. Arkady acknowledged receipt, caught between anger over the deaths of his friends and sympathy for Boris. Boris Ivanovich had been friends with many of the crew of the Czar Alexis too.

  Petr was there by the time he signed off and Arkady turned to his typewriter with the written note. He flipped the switch that engaged the transmission to the next station and started typing out the message. Two things happened as he typed. One was that a coded signal was sent to the next station and the other was a typed copy was made. The moment he was finished, he pulled the typed copy from the writer and handed the message to Petr.

  Grigory Mikhailovich Anichkov, the new manager of the dirigible works at Bor, had been appointed after half the staff had run off to Ufa, and much of his job had been to make sure that that sort of defection didn’t happen again. The other half of his job was to make sure that the dirigible works continued to turn out dirigibles. It wasn’t easy and he didn’t much like the job. The intellectuals—what Bernie Zeppi and Cass Lowry had called geeks—were all under a degree of suspicion after large numbers of them had followed Czar Mikhail into exile. Grigory wasn’t a geek; he was a cavalry officer. He didn’t particularly like the dirigibles or the radios or any of the other new innovations that led to the chaos that they were all facing. But Grigory wasn’t a fool either. He realized how vital the Czar Alexis was to scouting the route of General Birkin’s army on its way to Kazan.

  He talked to the geeks and then ordered them to get something the size of the Testbed built as quickly as possible. It was a major change in priorities. Up till then, they had focused on making ever larger dirigibles because of what the intellectuals called “economy of scale.” A larger dirigible could lift more for the amount of time and effort it took to make it. Now they would focus on making several smaller dirigibles, tiny by dirigible standards, with a lifting capacity measured in hundreds of pounds, not in tons. Work on the as yet unnamed third Czar-class dirigible was stopped and the D’iak class was introduced. They wouldn’t carry nearly as much or have nearly the range, but they would be quicker to build and faster in the air. They would also be smaller targets and they could make three of them for the materials in one Czar-class dirigible. All if this took time and it would be months before the first D’iak came out of the hanger, but the decision was made that day.

  Moscow

  December 1636

  News of the downing of the Czar Alexis was delivered to Bor by radio from the Czarina Evdokia. The Czarina was equipped with a spark gap transmitter. It wasn’t all that powerful, but it did have a long antenna, so anytime it got close enough to a land-based radio it could share the news, so to speak. From Bor, it took less than two hours for the news to reach Moscow. Sheremetev wasn’t grateful for the news, and he was even less pleased that the radio network had spread it all over Russia before he could do anything about it. In the days just following Mikhail’s defection, the director-general had tried to get a handle on the gossip of the radio operators by making some of them examples. Within days he had lost dozens of radio stations. The operators had taken themselves and their radios off to join Mikhail.

  In this case, the news was made even juicier because someone had leaked the argument between Crown Prince Alexis and Princess Irina as well as the czarina’s decree that Anna would be the new name. It was just the sort of story that no radio man or parent could keep from sharing. It also put Sheremetev in the category of a an erring child.

  In spite of knowing it wouldn’t do any good, Director-General Sheremetev was tempted to make a few more examples. He didn’t, though. Radios, even when they weren’t transportable, were easy to break. And radio operators had a set of highly valuable skills that made it dangerous to mistreat them.

  Instead he sent off radio messages of his own.

  En route to Kazan

  December 1636

  General Birkin took the message from the exhausted post rider and handed it to his cousin. He could read, but it wasn’t something he was all that good at and he didn’t do it if he didn’t have to.

  GO DIRECTLY TO UFA STOP

  BYPASS KAZAN STOP

  He could do it. He was already marching along the frozen Volga. He could take his army south off the Volga, head directly for the confluence of the Volga and Belya River, and avoid Kazan altogether. But if he did, he would be stuck between Tim’s forces in Kazan and Czar Mikhail’s in Ufa. That would let Tim pull his army out of Kazan and shadow him all the way to Ufa, where Birkin’s army would be trapped between the walls of Ufa and Tim’s army. The Czarina Evdokia would keep Tim informed of his movements as well, so there would be little chance of turning and catching Tim in the open. Also, going cross country would be slower.

  Additionally, General Birkin didn’t have just a few malcontents in his army anymore. In the time he had spent waiting for the rivers to freeze, Czar Mikhail’s forces had increased a great deal due to the “good will missions” that he and his wife had made on board their dirigible, stopping in any town or city where Sheremetev wasn’t in firm control and promising a constitutional convention where all the peoples of Russia would have a say in the structure of the government. It was an effective ploy, and it had produced a lot of defections to Czar Mikhail’s side.

  Well, he didn’t have to decide yet. The best place to leave the Volga highway wouldn’t be for another three days.

  General Birkin sent off his own dispatch. It went to Bor, insisting he needed an eye
in the sky as soon as possible. That was true in any case, but especially true if he was supposed to march all the way to Ufa leaving the force in Kazan in his rear.

  Well before that time, General Birkin got another dispatch canceling the order. Apparently cooler heads had prevailed. Or at least the director-general had had a chance to cool off a little.

  Goritsky Monastery

  “Bernie always said that the dirigibles were fragile in combat,” Sofia said, a bit complacently.

  “Sheremetev must be spitting nails,” said Elena.

  There was general laughter.

  “Tatyana, have you written…” Sofia trailed off because Tatyana was shaking her head.

  “I wrote my brother about them, but it’s not so easy. Sheremetev has his cousin, Ivan Petrovich, overseeing the mica production. And he’s skimming off so much of it that there’s barely enough to satisfy the Moscow contracts.”

  Russia was still selling Muscovy glass or Muscovy mica to the USE, but it was not going through Vladimir. Instead, it was going to support the Sheremetev-appointed ambassador to the USE—and apparently to line the pockets of Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev, who was widely considered to be the most corrupt man in Russia.