1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  “Czar Mikhail is opposed to that because he’s certain that some of the states will insist on continuing serfdom,” Natasha told him. “He can see a civil war over serfdom if it’s allowed to stand.”

  “Yes, you’re right. But…” Vladimir looked over at Bernie and Sir William Blake, arguing over the fate of Mangazeya. “Where are the Mangazeyans in this?”

  John Adams insisted that they couldn’t go back to Hamburg until extensive repairs were made. And after reading the list of repairs, Vladimir agreed that they would leave the Catherine in Mangazeya till the summer melt, and take the ice boats down the river to Tobolsk, then a caravan on the Babinov road to Solikamsk, then sleighs to Ufa. That was necessary because the false keel that had acted as skid for the last part of the trip was worn down and would have to be replaced. So would several other parts of the ship that had suffered excessive wear or damage in the course of the trip. They weren’t going to have to rebuild the ship, but they would be all of April and probably most of May repairing it. In the meantime, they would collect furs, pearls, diamonds, and whatever else they could manage as high value cargoes to go back to the USE to pay for the goods they had bought on Ron Stone’s credit.

  The Cath had a shipload of gear, including radio tubes that would extend the range of the radio stations considerably, and designs for directional antenna that would extend them more. That was especially important in Eastern Russia, where the population was small and distances were great.

  They spent a week in Mangazeya setting up a radio station with a rotateable directional antenna, then got on the road, taking much of the cargo of the Catherine the Great as well as representatives of the Khanty and Mansi peoples. And as they made their way back south, Bernie was thinking about the Napoleonic quote. Not the one about eggs, the one that went “You may ask me for anything you like, except time.” It was going to take time to get back to Ufa and there was nothing they could do about that. In the meantime, they were out of touch.

  CHAPTER 22

  Preparing for War

  Ufa

  March 1637

  “The lines are stable,” Evdokia read the radiotelegraph message aloud. “Birkin has backed off a bit and we still hold Kazan. Once you can get steamboats back on the river, we will be in good position to hold the Volga from the Caspian Sea to Kazan. However, I do not have the forces to push Birkin back. With the new weapons, the defense is much stronger than it was in the past. Not three to one, but ten to one, or a hundred to one.”

  Evdokia looked over at Mikhail. “Stable, he says. We have Don Cossacks in the courtyard, Mongols in the halls, boyars in the conference rooms, and peasants in the streets. And all of them demanding that the constitution give them everything they want. Dictatorship is starting to look good, Mikhail.”

  “It’s not…” Mikhail trailed off. The truth was that things were that bad. Last fall, Mikhail had promised a constitutional monarchy. Over the winter, word had gone out that Czar Mikhail was going to be holding a constitutional convention. And, aside from the people invited, there were whole groups that had just shown up. Increasingly, the former serfs were pushing for a voice in the deliberations. Mostly under the leadership of Vera Sergeevna, Izabella Ivanovna Utkin, and—much to Father Kiril’s annoyance—Father Yulian Eduardovich who, it turned out, was a very effective public speaker. Father Yulian, aside from his speaking ability, was moderately well read and becoming more so with each passing day. When he wasn’t screwing around with the local women, he was reading translations of up-time political texts or giving speeches and sermons. And the point he kept harping on was that up-time, it was “the people,” not the nobility, who ran things. As though nobles were actually not people, but some lesser breed that had, by some horrible accident, gotten control.

  Every time the man started talking, Mikhail felt the guillotine at the back of his neck. And if he made Mikhail nervous, he made most of the nobility—both the great houses and the lesser nobility—positively livid. If Mikhail hadn’t acted to prevent it, Father Yulian would have already been dead in a ditch somewhere. Followed by riots. Followed by that guillotine again. Sometimes, Mikhail wished he could deal with a nice simple war rather than all this politics.

  Two hundred fifty miles southeast of Ufa

  Salqam-Jangir Khan was young, Colonel Leontii Shuvalov thought. He was also weak and in need of allies. Leontii was willing to use that, and he had spent the last three months working his way into a position to convince the young khan to attack Ufa. To do so, he had promised the khan ten thousand AK3 rifles and one hundred thousand chambers. Then he explained his inability to deliver the rifles, by virtue of Czar Mikhail’s forces holding the lower Volga so they couldn’t ship the rifles to them. It had not been an easy sell, and his influence was still far from certain. Leontii had had to bribe, and promise bribes, to half the khan’s court to get their support.

  But it had worked. He had a force of almost thirty thousand Kazakh warriors with bows and steppe ponies ready to go. It wasn’t going to do little Tim Lebedev much good to hold Kazan if Ufa was hit from the southeast. He bowed, the full, forehead to the floor bow, and backed out of the boy’s presence.

  Turning away from the tent, he saw Togym eyeing him and hid a grimace. That damned little bastard was trying to get the boy to change his mind again. He had been pushing the young khan toward stronger ties with the Turks from the beginning. Leontii forced a smile and Togym snorted. Worst of all, Leontii hadn’t had a beer in three months.

  He kept walking, heading for his horse and his small company of guards. They weren’t any happier to be here than Leontii was, but at least they were civilized.

  Togym watched the outlander go and then went in to see Jangir. “Great Khan.”

  “Don’t say it, Cousin. Honestly, I don’t trust him much more than you do. But the Ring of Fire happened. He is not our only source for that. And in that other history, we were subjugated by the Russians and Islam was outlawed by the Soviets.”

  “Whatever Soviets are,” Togym answered.

  The khan picked up his coffee and sipped. “We need those guns. We are beset, my Cousin, and we need the strength.”

  “Then why not deal with their Czar Mikhail?”

  “Because Director-General Sheremetev is in Moscow looking west and Mikhail is in Ufa looking south and east. Who is more likely to try and gobble us up, do you think?”

  “Czar Mikhail has offered freedom of faith to Muslims in Kazan.”

  “And we should trust a man who will not defend his own faith to defend ours?”

  The boy had a point, Togym had to admit. He wasn’t stupid, just young and probably scared. He had only been khan for a few years, and he had been a child when the crown had fallen to him. Togym just wished he’d managed to get an ambassador from Czar Mikhail’s court to counter Colonel Leontii Shuvalov. Well, it was too late now. They were in the field, on their way to Ufa.

  Dirigible Valley

  “It flies,” Dimitry Ivanov said, gratuitously. It was pretty obvious that the new dirigible flew. It had four hydrogen cells, not the twelve of the big ones, and the cells were smaller, as well. But it would lift four tons of usable cargo, in addition to engines, boiler water, and fuel. It didn’t have the range of the Czarina, but it was probably going to be a little faster.

  “That’s very good. Because we’re almost out of grain, and I don’t want to walk out of the valley,” Gregorii said. The box canyon had an exit, but it was down a hill that was almost a cliff. It could be gotten into or out of, but not easily. When they had had the Czarina to ship in supplies that had seemed a great idea. Since they got the radio message that the Czarina crashed in Germany, the security had seemed less important than some way of getting in fresh supplies. The dirigible team turned all their effort into getting something into the air as soon as possible and they had done it, even if it was an almost reversion to the Testbed that Colonel Nick had first flown in 1633.

  “We still need to finish the shell and we will n
eed a detachable gondola for shipping supplies.”

  “Then don’t you think you should get to that?” Gregorii asked. “Or do you plan on eating grass this summer?”

  Dimitry got back to it. It was a hacked together thing made of cut down parts, but in its way, it was a work of art. The unavailability of aluminum had encouraged experimentation in alternate structural materials and the knowledge that composites were cutting edge science up-time had encouraged experimentation into composites as structural members. The Testbed had used bamboo shipped up from China and to a great extent so had the Czarina Evdokia, but she was starting to use shaped composites as structural members. The Prince Alexis had gone even farther in that direction. It still used bamboo where they couldn’t spread the load, but mostly it used shaped composites that were lighter for their overall strength, but weaker at any given point than bamboo. The shaped composites had another flaw. They had to be designed and made for a specific size of airship. The shaped composite components of the Prince Alexis’ shell couldn’t be cut down or reshaped to make a smaller dirigible. But Dimitry had come up with an alternative. The skin and skeleton of the Prince Alexis was mostly made of a series of curved triangles. The triangles were made of fabric impregnated with stiffener then stamped into shape and cured. Once formed, they were quite strong for their weight and they had stamped-in attachments that let them be tied together to form a cylinder of a predetermined circumference.

  But the new dirigible needed a smaller circumference. Dimity’s solution was to use the pre-made panels from the Prince Alexis and add in special new panels that curved quite sharply. It gave the Princess Anna a boxy, flattish appearance and increased the stress on the new panels to a level that worried Dimitry. But it let them use the Alexis’s panels for two-thirds of the exoskeletal skin.

  Dimitry figured another week to finish the skin and put together a cargo gondola and they would be ready to fly for real.

  Bor

  March 1637

  The D’iak 1, first of the D’iak-class airships, sailed down out of the sky. It was tiny compared to the Czar class and it had a useful lift of just over a thousand pounds. It made its way into the hangar and there was room for the almost completed D’iak 2. Dimitry Alekseev Dolgorukov climbed out, cursing. “The damned radio failed again.” He waved back at the airship. “When are your techs going to get it right?”

  The radio miniaturization was less than fully effective, and the little ones were more prone to breakdowns. Grigory Mikhailovich Anichkov was fully aware of that fact, and the radios had been giving them trouble from the beginning. “They’re working on it. In the meantime, what’s your report?”

  “There is a huge delegation heading for Ufa. If I’d had a radio I could have told General Birkin about…” Dimitry trailed off at Grigory’s look, “Anyway there is a huge train of sleighs packed with goods and people heading down the Kama river…” Dimitry gave a description of what the caravan on the Kama had looked like yesterday afternoon.

  On the road from Solikamsk

  Bernie leaned over to kiss Natasha and the sleigh stopped again. Every freaking time, dammit. “I’m going to kill them. I don’t care which tribal leader or minor Mongol potentate it is this time, I’m going to kill them.”

  Natasha laughed, but she didn’t quite carry it off. “Maybe you should let General Izmailov deal with it.” They had been picking up representatives to the Russian constitutional convention since they left Mangazeya. Shein had sent orders for General Izmailov to accompany them as Shein’s representative to the convention. No one was committed to joining by sending delegates, but having delegates from all the different groups—or as many of them as they could get—would give the convention additional credence.

  This time it was a group of deti boyar sons on their way to join Shein. After some discussion, most of them headed on for Shein’s Siberian state. But Petr Vasilievich Yazykov, who was near the upper end of the lower nobility, decided to go to Ufa and see what was what.

  Ufa

  March 1637

  Stefan Andreevich waved the man with the wheelbarrow over to the corner. It was a load of iron ore. Not great iron ore, but not bad, and the wheelbarrows had been bringing it in for most of the morning.

  “Excuse me. Are you Stefan Andreevich?”

  Stefan looked over at a short, pudgy man, with a neatly trimmed beard. Peter the Great would never be born to force the nobles of Russia to shave, but Czar Mikhail, leading by example, had introduced the short, well-trimmed beard. And this fellow was clearly a follower of fashion, and not just where beards were concerned. He was well-dressed. Very well-dressed.

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  “I need a stainless steel bowl.”

  Stefan blinked. “A what?”

  “A stainless steel bowl. Actually, I need a dozen of them, in several sizes, for the czar’s kitchen.”

  “We don’t do small orders here. You need Yuri Petrovich’s shop on Anna Lane, the other side of Hangar Road. He’s very…”

  But the chubby little man was shaking his head. “He says that he doesn’t have an induction furnace and copper won’t do.”

  Stefan blinked again. Then, giving it up as a bad job, called out, “Lady Izabella, can you help this gentleman?”

  A moment later, Izabella’s head popped out of the office. “What’s the problem?”

  “He wants stainless steel pots.”

  “Bowls,” the man said. “For the Czar’s Kitchen.” Stefan could hear the capital letters on “Czar’s Kitchen.”

  “Oh, that’s marvelous.” Izabella beamed. “That means you have a source of chromium.”

  The little man looked confused. “What? No. What’s cromanaman?”

  Stefan turned back to his work as Izabella guided the man to the office. Yes, this was his factory, or at least partly his. But the truth was, Stefan would always be a shop floor owner, not an office owner.

  “And what is your name, sir?” Izabella asked. She could already tell what he was. He was a courtier to the czar’s court in exile. It was a safe bet that he had just received some posting.

  “Artemi Fedorovich Polibin,” the little man said.

  Izabella recognized the name. They were successful courtiers, not really aligned. “I am Izabella Ivanovna Utkin, part owner of this factory. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  He did. In rather boring detail. With emphasis. He was the New Master of the Kitchens at the Czar’s Court. He had consulted with the cooks and discussed the issue with the staff of the New Dacha Complex and come to the conclusion that what the kitchens needed were induction cook tops and induction ovens. “Several of the staff at the electrical center thought it was an excellent idea. And it would have the advantage of keeping things like charcoal dust and soot away from the food.”

  Izabella had seen the induction furnaces that they used on the factory floor. There were several of them, powered by a steam-powered alternator. It had proved a moderately expensive, but very efficient, way of heating steel to the point of plasticity and of melting iron to a liquid state so that the amount of carbon in the steel could be controlled with a good degree of precision. It also concentrated the heat in the metal, which meant that the containers didn’t have to be quite as heat-resistant. But cooking with it? It seemed to Izabella that it would melt the pots in minutes and burn the food in seconds.

  She knew that you could control the heat by controlling the power of the alternating magnetic field, but the coolest she had ever seen from one of them was red-hot iron. Not as hot as yellow-hot or white-hot, but way too hot for cooking.

  “Why do you want stainless steel?”

  “Why, because it must be stainless steel to work with an induction heating element.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Izabella said.

  “Well, of course it does. I have it on the highest authority.”

  “Come with me.”

  She led Artemi out to the shop floor and, being careful to make sure that she
didn’t interrupt anything in progress, looked for a worker at one of the induction coils. She found one quickly. “Petr, can you show Sir Artemi how your induction forge works?” Petr was one of the slaves who had been working in the gun shop when Czar Mikhail issued the emancipation proclamation. Petr had good skills in metal working, but not so good when it came to finding his way in the wilderness. He had wandered into Ufa in November of last year, half-frozen, and Stefan hired him on the spot.

  “Sure,” Petr said. “Come over here.” He pulled a lever and a heavy weighted stamp lifted. “First, we raise the hammer using the electric motor here.” He disconnected the switch when the hammer was at the top of its arc. “Then we grab the part. You can see that these parts have already gone through some shaping and they have had the fringe knocked off, so they are ready for the next step.” He held up a pair of tongs and pointed. “We use a bronze mouth on the tongs, so that the coil won’t heat it. It still gets pretty hot from the part heating, but not as hot as if it was iron.” He used the tongs with skill to pick up a part and move it into the empty center of a heavy copper coil and pushed a button. In just a few seconds the part went from black through red to orange. He released the button and pulled the part from the coil, then set it in the hollow in the drop hammer base plate. Then he pulled a lever and the hammer fell on the part. He used the electric motor to lift the hammer a bit and reached in with the tongs to grab the part and drop it into a cart.