1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  That was bad news, but Tatyana continued. “He’s doing what he can, but it will be months before he can find enough to make a shipment.”

  “Thank you for your efforts,” Sofia said. “They will not be forgotten when Czar Mikhail wins.”

  Tatyana looked at Sofia, and she wasn’t the only one. “Do you really think that can happen?”

  “Yes, I think I do,” Sofia said. “I wouldn’t have believed it in June when Czar Mikhail ran off to Ufa, but now…I think he can win. It’s not a sure thing by any means, but it’s certainly a possibility.”

  New Ruzuka

  Father Yulian went for a walk around the town of New Ruzuka. The buildings were mostly built by now, but it was way too late to do any planting. They had gotten most of the tree stumps out before the ground froze. Well, over half anyway. Barely over half, but over half, and that lumber had been put to good use. There was a lumber mill in Ufa that could cut logs into boards and the villagers, with the help of the riverboat they had stolen, had been shipping logs to Ufa and boards back to New Ruzuka from the beginning of October to the middle of November and then using those boards to make the double-walled wood panels that they had developed back in old Ruzuka from Dacha designs. Now those double-walled wood panels were being used as walls for the town buildings. The weaving shop and the carding house, smithy and the carpenter shop, the church and the barn, and the mill building were up, though they didn’t have the millstones yet. A bunch of the young men were trying to build a freeze-drying facility. The cooper from Konevo had set up a cooperage.

  Most of the houses were finished as well, and it was starting to look like New Ruzuka was going to be a nice town.

  “Father Yulian!”

  Yulian winced at the voice of Petr Petrovich, one of the young men who had joined them in Ufa. Petr Petrovich had delusions of martial prowess. “Yes, Petr?”

  “When are we going to get the new chambers?”

  “When Stefan gets around to it, Petr,” Yulian said for what must be the hundredth time. Well, tenth, but Petr was so irritating about it that each repetition counted for ten. “First, we don’t have the caps for the new chambers. Second, we don’t have the need. An AK3 is fine for hunting and we have no great need of anything more. We’re only a few miles from Ufa and any attack will come from the west through Ufa.”

  “They’ll encircle Ufa, Father Yulian. I explained that. And when they do that, they are going to start searching for villages to raid for supplies. Our being close to Ufa is a bad thing then, because we’ll be first in their path.”

  “By then, assuming that Birkin gets this far, we’ll all be in Ufa.”

  “Ufa doesn’t have walls, either. And what if they surprise us?”

  “That’s not entirely true. The walls may not be complete, but there are bastions and several of the buildings are quite solid. As to them catching us out, don’t be ridiculous. The Czarina Evdokia is keeping good track of General Birkin’s forces.”

  The conversation went on from there. Petr being irritating and utterly convinced that the sky was about to fall on New Ruzuka. Yulian couldn’t ignore the young man. He was a leader among the new additions to the town who had joined them in Ufa and used their land allotments to add to the size of the town’s land and bank account in Ufa.

  After a few minutes, Father Yulian lost patience. “What do you want me to do? Go into Ufa and demand that instead of sending caps to Kazan or Sviyazhsk they should instead send them to us?”

  “They’re making their own caps in Kazan,” Petr said belligerently and Father Yulian threw up his hands in frustration.

  Sviyazhsk kremlin, Kruglaya Mountain

  “Alexander, do we have the caps?” Major Ivan Maslov asked.

  Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov shook his head, wishing he were back on the steamboat, laying mines. That had been his job after General Lebedev had assigned him here. Or better yet, he wished he was back in Ufa, with Izabella. Alexander could now admit without too much rancor that the baker’s son was a truly clever young man, and even that his plans and plots had been the main factor that had stopped the riverboats. But the red-headed major was a horrible worry wart. The new caps for the caplock chambers weren’t even expected for another two days, but Major Ivan had been harping on them for the last week.

  It wasn’t as though Alexander didn’t understand the importance of the caps. A flintlock, or even a wheel lock, AK misfired fairly often. They also took longer to load. A caplock AK with loaded chambers could be reloaded almost as fast as an up-time single-shot weapon and almost never misfired, even in a pouring rain.

  General Lebedev and the craftsmen in Kazan had promised them fifty thousand caps. Which wasn’t a lot, but the main army was in Kazan, not here.

  Major Ivan started to say something else, then managed to stop himself. “Sorry, Alex. I know it’s not your fault, but the Czarina reports that Birkin and his men are less than forty miles from here. I really don’t want them to invest us before we get those caps.”

  Alex nodded this time. It wasn’t all that hard to convert a flintlock AK3 to a caplock AK4. There were kits to do it and they had plenty. The AK4 also took a different chamber, but they had a good number of the caplock chambers too. The holdup was the caps themselves. Ivan didn’t want to change the AKs over till he knew he would have the caps for them.

  The garrison on the mountain had grown with the addition of Streltzi and freed peasants. It was three thousand men now, and they were well dug in with some six-pound cannon and a lot of rockets. It would be a hard nut for General Birkin to crack when he got here, and he would be subject to attack from Kazan while he was trying.

  Alexander remembered the war games he had played right here in this room over the last weeks. He had been Birkin, then Ivan had been Birkin, then Captain Lagunov. In fact, every officer in the fort had gotten to play Birkin several times. Scenario after scenario, trying to figure out what they would try. Alexander smiled. Captain Lagunov’s frontal assault had been a disaster for the attackers, even though they had taken the mountaintop finally, because Lagunov had lost half his army doing it and General Lebedev, played by Ivan, had attacked his rear after he had committed to the attack. Almost, Alexander hoped that Birkin would try it. Not that Alexander wanted to be Davy Crockett at the Alamo, whoever that was and wherever that was. But from a strategic viewpoint, that would be the best outcome.

  They went on talking about supplies and fortification. Alexander had become Major Ivan’s logistics officer. He was the only other officer on the mountain with Moscow Kremlin training.

  General Birkin looked up at the fortified mountain top and decided. A frontal assault was out of the question. His twelve-pounders could knock down the stone walls sure enough, but they couldn’t knock down the mountain they were standing on. His troops would spend hours climbing that hill under fire. General Birkin had never heard of Pickett or Pickett’s Charge, but even Pickett with Lee’s spurs in his backside wouldn’t have charged that hill.

  “What do you think, Cousin?” asked Iakov.

  “Well, we could sit out here till they starve,” General Birkin said. “That shouldn’t take more than a year.”

  Iakov laughed, but there was little joy in the sound.

  “No. We’ll do what we discussed. Leave a blocking force to invest it and move on to Kazan.”

  “How many?”

  “It will have to be ten thousand. Five thousand might do it, but they might not either. So, without firing a shot, those people up on the hill have taken a fifth of my army out of the fight.”

  It took a week to invest the fort, during which Ivan, Alexander and the others manning the fort were caught between glee and chagrin.

  What did you do in the war, Daddy?

  Well, I sat on my ass on a mountain top while everyone else fought.

  In the meantime, thanks to the view from the top of Kruglaya Mountain, Ivan was able to give Tim in Kazan clear and detailed reports on every move the enemy made, without any nee
d for the Czarina Evdokia to stay around.

  Kazan kremlin

  General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev looked out at the advancing armies with an assurance that wasn’t exactly feigned. He believed his show of confidence was justified, at least intellectually. Kazan was a city on a hill. While some of the suburbs spiraled down the hillsides, the main city was an uphill slog for any sort of attacking army. But he only had six thousand men here. And in spite of the people who had been shipped to Ufa and old Kazan to get them out of the line of fire, he still had almost twenty thousand civilians in the city. Most of them busily working in the shops, making everything from extra chambers for the AKs to sandbags to reinforce the walls. That was a lot of lives depending on book learning from up-time books and Ivan Maslov’s analysis.

  Besides, Tim had just turned twenty and it didn’t feel right to be confident facing generals with twice his age and much more than twice his field experience. In spite of which, he turned to the man standing next to him, who wasn’t looking very happy at all. “We’ll do fine,” he said. From the expression on Abdul Azim’s face, he was sounding a little too confident.

  He looked over at Colonel Mikhail Petrovich Kolumb, who was scowling at him. “Relax, Colonel. Either we win or you get to crow over my defeat. You can’t lose.”

  Colonel Kolumb’s face started to turn red, but he was interrupted before he could speak.

  “We are outnumbered, General,” Abdul said.

  “Yes. But they are attacking uphill against walls reinforced by sandbags with…”

  Abdul held up a hand. They had gone over this before. The changes in war fighting technology had an effect on tactics. And they could see that General Birkin was following Ivan the Terrible’s play book from eighty years ago.

  “The longer he takes getting ready, the better off we are,” Tim continued.

  “I wish Czar Mikhail hadn’t sent the dirigible off to Germany,” Abdul said.

  Tim wished the same thing, but it was an emotional wish. Between their location and Ivan Maslov’s forces atop Kruglaya Mountain, they had most of the enemy under observation. Still, whatever the political advantage to fetching Prince Vladimir back from Grantville, Tim would have liked to see the Czarina Evdokia in the—

  There was a roar of cannon. The attack had started. Birkin’s cannon weren’t very big. They were rifled twelve-pounders, but the twelve-pound projectiles were enough—if just barely—to knock down the walls that had been built to defend Kazan because those walls were curtain walls.

  It would take them a while, but the cannons would blow a breach. It didn’t surprise Tim, but it wasn’t good news.

  “They will be at it for days,” Tim said, “perhaps weeks, before they get a breach big enough for an assault.” He looked back up at the clear blue winter sky and wished the Czarina was in it.

  CHAPTER 18

  Death of a Czarina

  Czarina Evdokia, over Poland

  The sky over Poland was anything but clear. And the Czarina Evdokia wasn’t a pressurized-cockpit jet that could fly over the weather. Instead when they didn’t expect danger from below they flew at less than a thousand feet. Over Poland, they were flying at two thousand feet because they weren’t sure how the Poles would respond to them. They had left Nyen five hours earlier, with a full load of fuel. For the first four hours, things went swimmingly, but for the last hour they had been getting deeper and deeper into cloudy skies. By now they were sailing under a bank of clouds and Nick seriously considered turning back.

  An hour later, Nick wished he had. The clouds had closed in behind them and at this point he wasn’t sure that he could get back, even if he tried. They moved on through a day that was as dark as night. Nick haunted the bridge, worrying. The winds were pushing them south from the coastal route they had been trying for.

  Nick had some more of the hot bitter tea as he looked out at a night black sky and saw the first snowflakes illuminated in the airship’s lights. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath. “All right. We need to try and get above this, even if it means we have to vent hydrogen to get back down. Let’s increase the hot air to the front cell and angle the motors down.”

  The Czarina climbed up into the clouds, but she did so slowly. There was a light dusting of snow on the massive airship, but even a light dusting on that large an area is a lot of weight and the Czarina struggled under the extra blanket. Slowly, they made their way through Poland to the USE. Unfortunately, to do it they were using fuel at a prodigious rate, and all the while the weather was getting worse.

  By the time they reached the area of Berlin, they were struggling under a thin coating of sleet and the winds were picking up. They passed fifty miles north of Berlin, but by then even if they had passed directly over the city, they wouldn’t have seen a thing.

  The wind shifted and buffeted the huge airship. It jerked and jerked again. The tea set was tied down and so was most of the rest of the gear, but you can’t get everything tied down. Pins came loose and rolled across the airship deck. Petr, who was trying to get a fix on their altitude, slipped and fell, then slid across the floor of the pilot house. Nick reached for him, but he was strapped in by a seat belt. Before he could get loose, the shaking had settled and Petr was trying to get back up. Reports of things coming loose and people injured came in as the wind jerked them again.

  “Emergency!” came over the phone. “The hydrogen cell is leaking! I can see the fucking rip from here.”

  It took Nick a moment to identify Airman Lev Olegovich, a rigger assigned to section three. “Cut power to section three.”

  The chief electrician of the dirigible opened a knife switch and Nick prayed it wasn’t too late. He looked out at the snow-filled night and at the edge of the ship’s lights. He saw shadows. They were losing altitude.

  For the next fifteen minutes, hydrogen cell five in section three vented hydrogen into the main body of the dirigible. They didn’t lose lift because the hydrogen wasn’t leaving the dirigible. The ice had frozen the vents closed, but no one had noticed in the dark.

  Nick could now see trees drifting by just below the gondola. He took a deep breath “Everyone to ‘abandon stations.’” There were places on the dirigible where you could jump if they weren’t too high and have a good chance of surviving. There were also places like up near the top of the airship where you had no chance at all. “Abandon stations” got the crew and—if there were any—passengers to places where they had at least some chance of surviving if the Czarina were to crash. But sending the crew to “abandon stations” meant that he wouldn’t have crew in the rigging to try to fight the leak. It was a tacit admission that the Czarina was going down. The crew started making their way to places where they would have a shot at living if the airship crashed. But Nick stayed and so did the bridge crew. Partly that was because the pilot house was already a good location to abandon from, but mostly it was because a lot could still be done. Or at least Nick hoped that they could limit the damage.

  The hydrogen escaped into the body of the dirigible where it mixed with oxygen as the Czarina sank closer to the ground. There was no spark in section three. But the wind was still whipping the sinking airship around and at fifty-three feet the stresses broke a circuit in section one…and there was a spark.

  When a balloon filled with hydrogen is ignited, it burns. But slowly, relatively speaking, as the oxygen and hydrogen mix. But if the oxygen and hydrogen are pre-mixed, as was the case here, it doesn’t burn. It explodes. Of course, even an explosion over the volume of an airship the size of Czarina Evdokia is not instant. Over the course of twenty-three seconds, the hydrogen and oxygen in the dirigible burned at a temperature half that of the surface of the sun. Hot gasses expand. The skin and the thin coating of ice on the skin contained the explosive force of the combustion, forcing it down. People in abandon stations were literally blown out of the dirigible, as though fired from a cannon. The force ripped loose the engine cars. There were no survivors in the engine cars.


  Able Airwoman Valeriya Zakharovna was wearing her parachute, more because it was the easiest way to carry it than because she thought it would be any help. However, it did save her life. When she was blown out of the dirigible, she hit a tree, parachute first, so only her arm and not her back was broken.

  In the command car, Yuri Danovic was thrown through one of the windows, leaving his legs behind. Petr was talking to the right engine car on the phone when the blast front hit. He was protected by the heavy circuit board and though he was shaken and bruised, he suffered nothing worse than that.

  Colonel Nikita Ivanovich Slavenitsky was thrown clear of the wreck, but landed badly. He broke one arm and cracked his skull. He was unconscious and there was swelling of the brain. He would never regain consciousness. Of the crew, there were seven survivors. Petr Nickovich, Valeriya Zakharovna, and five others.

  Petr found himself in command of the small contingent of Russian aeronauts, none of whom spoke German. Petr had some up-timer English from his time at the Gorchakov Dacha, and he could read a bit of German, but he couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t understand the version of German spoken by the local farmers who came out to see the fire and take him and his fellows into custody for burning down their firewood grove.

  Three hours after the crash, when Colonel Nikita died, Petr was wondering if he would ever get back to Russia.

  Sviyazhsk kremlin, Kruglaya mountain

  December 1636

  “We have a message from a Father Yulian for you, Alexander,” said Lieutenant Vadim Lagunov. “Did you get some peasant girl pregnant?”

  Alexander took the radio message and read. Then, not even beginning to understand why, headed for Ivan Maslov’s office. “She’s not a peasant,” he explained as he walked away. “And I’m not the father.”