1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  Once he got to the major’s office, he held out the radio telegram. “Sir, I need to get to Ufa.”

  “And according to this, fairly soon if you’re not going to miss the blessed event. Is this the girl who was with you on the boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re not the father. Or at least I don’t see how you could be. So why is it any concern of yours?”

  Alexander didn’t know what to say and Ivan waited. Finally, Alexander said, “I don’t know. But, somehow, it is.”

  “If you say so,” Ivan said, for once sounding his age—which was a couple of years younger than Alexander. Then the military officer was back. “Wait till this evening. I have some papers I want to send with you if you’re going to Ufa. Meanwhile I’ll send a radio message and see if I can get you some transport.”

  “What sort of transport? Isn’t the Czarina Evdokia in Germany by now?”

  “I have no idea but we might as well ask.” Ivan Maslov shrugged. “The siege lines around us are hardly tight. And it looks like Birkin is getting set to launch an assault on Kazan. Everyone will be looking that way, so you should be able to get through. Take the Sulitsa River to get past Kazan, then head for the next radio link.”

  Kazan

  After a week of shelling, there were two partial breaches in the curtain wall that surrounded Kazan. “General, there are troops massing across the Kazanka River.”

  Tim took his telescope and examined the area that the watcher had pointed to. It was true, if early. The breach wasn’t big enough.

  Tim issued a set of orders.

  “All right, men. They’re going to be coming through here. Get into position,” Captain Ustinov commanded. The Streltzi moved up to crouch behind the wall of sandbags they had built just inside the breach in the curtain wall.

  The breach was thirty feet wide and choked with the rubble of the wall. Once the men were in place, Captain Ustinov moved up to the left edge of the breach and looked around to see what was coming. The ground was covered in snow and ice and the river was solid as rock. Across the river, two hundred yards away from the wall, a troop of cavalry were forming up and Captain Ustinov suddenly remembered something that the general had said. “Don’t wait till you can see the whites of their eyes. Don’t even wait till you can see their eyes. Shoot the sons of bitches as soon as you can see their bodies. If they’re cavalry, shoot their fucking horses.” Well, they are cavalry. He turned to his men and leaned back against the curtain wall. “Yuri, bring your boys up here. Hide in the rubble.”

  Yuri looked at him, then shrugged. He waved to the men and then picked up a sandbag and came forward with it over his shoulder. The rest of the Streltzi did the same. By the time they were in place and used their sandbags to close up the gaps in the rubble, the cavalry was mostly formed up.

  “Is everyone ready now?” Captain Ustinov asked sarcastically. “Anyone want to put up a parasol, perhaps?”

  No one said anything, but a couple of the Streltzi grinned. One looked around like he was considering it.

  “Load your clips!” Ustinov shouted. The AK4.7 had a clip of five chambers. It was inserted from the right side and a sliding grip both cocked the hammer and shifted the chamber. Bernie Zeppi had said it worked like a pump action shotgun. But these were rifled, with chambers holding a hundred grains of black powder and a heavy bullet. They were deadly accurate at well over two hundred yards.

  He waited while they loaded the clipped together chambers into their AK4.7s, watching the horsemen who were advancing at the walk and still a hundred and fifty yards off.

  “Cock!”

  “Take aim!”

  “All right, fire!”

  “Cock!” Captain Ustinov yelled then he started to say “Aim!” but didn’t. The space in front of the men was smoke shrouded and they would be firing blind. He waited for the smoke to clear. As it cleared he saw the results of the first volley. Not great. A few hits, but not many. “Didn’t any of you idiots hear me say ‘aim’?”

  He looked down the line and saw that everyone had shifted the clip to the next chamber except Gorgi Davidovich who had somehow gotten his AK4.7 lock in half-cock position. “Yuri, see to Gorgi. The rest of you…aim this time. Ready, Aim, Squee—”

  Crack! Crack! Crackle!

  The guns started going off before he finished saying “squeeze,” and it wasn’t a very solid volley. However, it appeared that more of his people were aiming…or at least keeping their eyes open when they fired. When Captain Ustinov peeked around the wall there were considerably more of the enemy horses down.

  That was disrupting their charge. Some of the enemy were getting impatient and putting their horses into a gallop. Others weren’t. They were still too far away to be charging their horses. But they weren’t used to taking fire at this distance. He looked back at his people, crouched behind fallen stones and sandbags in a ragged line, long-barreled AK4.7s sticking out through the cracks in the ruined wall.

  “Cock!”

  “Captain, we only have one more preloaded clip each,” Yuri called out.

  Captain Ustinov started to snap back that he knew that, but in the heat he had forgotten. They had two clips for each man in the unit. Some of the men had more but, for the most part, when those were fired they would have to stop shooting and reload the chambers. It looked like two preloaded clips weren’t going to be enough.

  “Everyone, make sure your used clips are stowed.” Some of the men had bandoleers, but mostly they just had pouches.

  Ustinov looked around the wall again and smiled. The enemy who had gotten into a gallop were coming up the steep part of the hill now. But they were spread out and he could see the horses puffing in the cold air.

  “Yuri, have them fire by the right.” That was a maneuver that had each of the men wait till the man on their right had fired, then aim and fire himself. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you wanted to do against a massed charge, but with the cavalry struggling up the hill in ones and twos, it would mean a lot fewer misses.

  Captain Ustinov looked back around the wall and watched the result. It was a little better than the volleys had been, but not much. “All right, boys. Do it again!”

  They did it again and there wasn’t much left of the enemy leaders, but the rest weren’t giving up. The Kazan defenders kept on firing, and the thousand and more men on horses kept feeding themselves to the fire. There were piles of them on the ground in front of the breach, enough so that the horses behind were having to pick their way over and around the bodies of fallen horses and men. Meanwhile, the less than a hundred men manning the breach had used up their first clip and half their second. “Cease fire! Cock! Everybody ready? One more volley, then we’ll fall back!”

  Captain Ustinov wondered what was going on in the rest of the battle. “Fire!”

  Tim looked out from the Kazan kremlin tower. For communications within the city, they had run telegraph wires. And that meant that Tim couldn’t be down at the front. He had to stand here and watch the battle unfold so that he could see what the enemy was doing and send orders to counter it. It wasn’t like the battles at Rezhv or Bor. There, he had been with his men, giving his orders while standing in the line with them. Here, even the sound was muffled by the distance. Here, it was like watching the attack on Rezhv from the dirigible Testbed. All those men down there on both sides, like so many counters on a gaming table.

  Tim had fought battles. He had heard shots pass by his ear. He hated the fact that he liked it better this way. He could see what was going on, and he had the telegraph to send his orders quickly to the commanders. This position let him do his job much better, but it also left him a great deal safer. And Tim couldn’t be sure which part of that equation made him feel better about being here.

  But he didn’t have time to worry about it. Birkin was attacking from three points. He was hitting the lower city from one and the kremlin from two. Tim shook his head. The attacks up the hill to the kremlin were feints, most likely.
Even if they weren’t feints, they had little chance of success. It was the attack on the lower city across the frozen river that might have a chance. It was uphill too, but not as much. Tim ordered more troops to reinforce that breach.

  The reserves behind Captain Ustinov’s company on the east wall of the kremlin seemed to be sufficient.

  Captain Ustinov waved his men back and followed them. They had shot their wad, two clips each from a ninety-three men, nine hundred thirty rounds in less than five minutes. It had blunted the charge, and the enemy was reforming. But while that was happening, Ustinov and his men were falling back to be replaced by Achmed’s company. His men would reload while Achmed’s boys held the cavalry at bay.

  The day continued like that. The Muscovites would charge and the range and rate of fire would rip them up. They would retreat and reform while the defenders got their chambers reloaded by teams of reloaders just behind the lines with reload kits that reloaded a clip at a time. Twice, it looked like the enemy would break through. Twice, the other defending company was ordered up before they were fully reloaded to add their fire. They took losses, but their losses were small. Gorgi Davidovich had stood up in the middle of an enemy charge, trying to change clips, and been shot. Yuri had a sword cut on his right arm from a time when two horsemen had made it all the way up the hill to the wall. There were three more dead, but casualties had been incredibly light.

  Ivan Ivanovich Ustinov had been a Russian soldier since he was sixteen. He had been in border skirmishes against the Tatars and the Cossacks. He had lost men. But in all that time, he had never seen a battle that had produced nearly so many enemy casualties. There had to be a thousand men lying dead or badly injured out there. They were overwhelmingly the enemy…but they were fellow Russians for all of that. What shocked him was just how much more deadly the new weapons made war. And, as he thought about it, just how much they shifted the advantage to the dug-in defender.

  In his camp outside Kazan, General Birkin had yet to reach the same conclusion. His intellect was arguing for it, but his gut—years of experience in war, every story from the time he was a boy, every bit of his knowledge of how wars were fought—was arguing against it. He knew that what he was seeing was an aberration. He knew that the enemy’s casualties had to be almost as bad as his had been. It couldn’t have been any other way. His men had poured even more fire into the enemy than the enemy had poured out on his men. He had to have killed thousands of them. He had to have! Besides, there was no possible way that a nineteen-year-old political general could possibly do this to him.

  In fact, the whole day’s attack—cannon and rifle together—had only killed fifty-three of the defenders and almost half of them had been civilians working on the walls. Or, in one case, five women in a market stall when a shot aimed at a section of wall had overshot and gone into the city. The difference between charging in the open and firing from cover and concealment was, quite literally, the difference between life and death. Only half a dozen times in the whole day’s battle had soldiers gotten close enough for bayonet or sword to come into play.

  But General Birkin didn’t know any of that—and wouldn’t have believed it if he had. So the next day he tried it again. And the day after that. By the fourth day, he had lost too many men to ignore. His army of forty thousand was now an army of thirty eight thousand. He still had the ten thousand investing Kruglaya Mountain, but he couldn’t pull them out without the enemy on that mountain becoming a serious threat.

  Still convinced that somehow Boris Timovich Lebedev had cheated, General Birkin settled down for a winter siege.

  It took Alexander and Leonid Ivanovich three days to reach the next radio station past Kazan. It was in a little village just far enough off the river to be mostly out of sight.

  Leonid was grinning at him the whole way. Surprisingly enough, Leonid had stayed with him after they got to Ufa. Leonid had never been much of a farmer and he was a very good batman. Alexander had given him a raise and promised not to interfere with any romances that might arise. And a romance of sorts had arisen with the older of Izabella’s maids. More of a friendly thing, Alexander thought, but it was the maid who had gotten Leonid over his silent anger. Alexander noticed that Leonid, now that he had the option of quitting and wasn’t under threat of whipping, was a lot more open with his opinions.

  “Yep, very clever of you, young master, to swoop in after that priest did all the work. She ought to be well trained up by now.”

  Alexander noted that the lack of a whipping post might not be altogether advantageous. Civilized maybe, but not without its disadvantages. “We’re here,” he said, pointing at the antenna sticking up out of the trees.

  It was only a few more minutes before they reached the small village compound. The village only had five families, a couple of trappers and a couple of shops. There were no crops. They traded for food and the radio and radio operators were a great boon to the small community of Laishevo.

  As they entered the clearing where the houses were, they saw the Dodge sitting there. It had a trailer attached behind it, a two-wheeled trailer, piled high with gear including a dozen Russian-made jerry cans that probably held fuel.

  “Wow, you must be important!” Leonid said. Then, clearly reconsidering, said, “No. Must be the girl. They don’t want the baby to be illegitimate.”

  “Why am I paying you?” Alexander muttered.

  “For my sage advice. Why else?”

  They had dinner that night with Bernie Zeppi and Leonid Ivanov, one of Princess Natasha’s personal armsmen.

  “Welcome, Alexander,” Bernie said.

  “Welcome, Leonid,” Leonid said. “Has the boy been giving you trouble?”

  “Not too bad, Leonid. Is Bernie still making cow eyes at the princess?”

  “Sure enough. He gets above himself, Bernie does.”

  Bernie looked at Alexander and sighed. “It’s going to be a long trip.”

  “Speaking of which, Gospodin Zeppi, why the Dodge?”

  “Anya has something going with your Izabella and that factory,” Bernie said. “And I don’t know why beyond that. It’s part of the female conspiracy, I guess. It’s not like that factory is the only one in Ufa.”

  “Izabella has been keeping in touch over the radio. Between the village and the factory and the land grant that Czar Mikhail gave me when he drafted me, she had quite a nest egg of capital in the bank, so she has been investing in businesses in Ufa. I think Olga’s involved too.”

  Bernie was nodding. “It makes sense. Even before you guys got there, Ufa had two or three steamboats a day, in and out. Things have slowed down now, but there is still a lot of sleigh traffic and ice boats.”

  That fit in with what Izabella had been telling Alexander in her radio messages.

  They finished dinner and the Leonid “twins” continued to comment on the care and feeding of their charges. Then they headed out the next morning, Bernie and Leonid Ivanov taking turns at the controls of the Dodge.

  Ufa

  December 1636

  They were too late by four hours. The baby had been born at 11:15 AM on December twentieth, and they didn’t arrive till almost four. It didn’t matter. Alexander took one look at the little girl and was in love. It didn’t make him forgive Father Yulian, but he wouldn’t have traded baby Anya for anything.

  Alexander and Izabella were married two days later in a ceremony performed by Father Kiril. Father Yulian offered to give the bride away, but the offer was refused.

  Czar Mikhail waved Alexander to a seat. “I see no need to send you back to Sviyazhsk. They are besieged and unless Birkin proves to be an utter idiot, nothing much is going to happen there. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Alexander said. “Things might get a bit dicey in Kazan, but there is no way that the force Birkin has at Sviyazhsk is getting up the mountain.”

  “There was bad news about the dirigible, Czarina Evdokia. It crashed near Berlin with great loss of life. Nick Slavensk
y was killed in the crash. The head of our air force and the first Russian to fly has died. Russia has lost one of her greatest heroes, and I have lost a friend.”

  “I heard, Your Majesty,” Alexander said, not knowing what else to say.

  “What that means is that the good will tours the czarina and I had been making…we can’t do any more. Not because of the risk, but because of the time it will take to travel. The most amazing thing about the Czarina Evdokia was the speed. We could go from Ufa to the Caspian Sea in a day, well, almost. It meant that we could visit personally the local heads of government and it allowed us to make much greater headway in negotiating with the various factions.

  “I don’t want to lose that progress, so I need to send someone on a goodwill mission down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. To facilitate that, I am making you a roving ambassador to the states along the Volga and appointing you dumnye dvoriane.”

  Alexander’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again…and nothing came out. There were several reasons for this. First was he was a newlywed man with a baby girl, and had not yet had an opportunity to sleep with his wife. And this mission almost certainly meant that he wouldn’t be here when she was ready to resume conjugal activities. Second, because this was one hell of a promotion. Dumnye dvoriane was just one rank below okolnichii and his family was just barely of a rank to receive such an appointment. It would normally go to someone much higher in the family hierarchy than a scapegrace third son of a second son. And finally, because Alexander wasn’t at all sure that he was qualified. No. That wasn’t nearly strong enough. He was utterly certain that he wasn’t qualified. This was a job for someone far more experienced. “Your Majesty, this is a job for a master diplomat. Not a…”

  Czar Mikhail held up a hand. “No, for two reasons. I don’t have nearly enough experienced people for all the jobs I need done. But also because I need someone who actually served in the fall campaign and is a member of one of the great families. I need someone who can tell them, from personal experience, that Tim knows what he’s doing, that his holding Kazan is not a fluke.”