1636:The Kremlin games rof-14

by Eric Flint

  Lying under some bushes, Cass let the adrenaline leak away from his system. He’d been an avid hunter since he was ten and a halfback all though high school. Since the Ring of Fire, he had hunted wild boar a lot. Moving fast, moving through woods, and shooting were all things he did quite well. Being shot at in return was a lot less fun.

  He reloaded the shotgun, as much for something to do with his hands as anything else. His hands were shaking a bit.

  Bernie’s marksmanship had been too good. The man whom Vladimir thought was the commander of the bandits couldn’t be questioned because he was dead. Bernie’s shot had gone into his chest just above the chest bone, shredding the aorta and cutting the spine-as deadly a shot as could be made. He must have been killed almost instantly.

  The attackers who had been captured were run-of-the-mill bandits, collected for this. They knew very little. Just that they had been hired and paid unusually well to attack this particular group. They were to kill everyone, take as much as they could carry and burn the rest. His equipage and clothing suggested that the commander might be Polish, but anyone could have hired him. The troops were spending quite a bit of time talking about Cass’ “broken-field running,” as Bernie called it. It made up some for the things he had been saying since he arrived. If he could learn manners, he could be an asset.

  “Vas’ka Kadnitsa will probably recover.” Bernie washed his hands. “But I wish we had a real doctor.” He didn’t specify what he meant by a real doctor. Another example of Bernie learning manners. By now, even the doctors at the Dacha acknowledged that they needed to go study with the up-timer doctors in Grantville. Bernie knew it, Natasha knew it, Vladislav knew it. There was no reason to harp on it.

  “I have sent a man to the nearest village to report and bring more troops,” Vladislav reported. “About all we know is that it wasn’t a random attack. It could have been the Poles trying to deny us access to up-timer knowledge. That will be what most people will assume. On the other hand, it could well have been a faction in the court, perhaps someone who opposes the income tax or the constitution.”

  Vladislav paused a moment, then his curiosity overcame him. “Bernie, what was that long gun Cass used?”

  “A pump-action shotgun.” Bernie grinned, albeit mirthlessly. As though he knew that more information would be requested, he continued. “It’s a smooth bore weapon that can fire a solid shot or a bunch of smaller pellets every time it’s fired. Cass was apparently using buckshot. It spreads, so you don’t need to be all that accurate and is heavy enough to take a man down at close range.”

  A scout rode up. He and Vladislav conferred for a moment. “We will camp a mile or so up the road. There is a good spot that can be made quite defensible. I don’t want to do any more traveling than we have to, not before we are reinforced.”

  Bernie and Natasha nodded. He was the captain and knew what he was doing.

  Chapter 43

  Dinner had been served outside and Natasha, Anya and Sofia had gone to their tent. Cass Lowry remained at the table, drinking vodka. The American had been drinking all afternoon. Vladislav kept a close eye on him. Lowry was a dangerous man-savage in a fight, and reckless and careless even when sober. He was also apparently a drunkard, judging from the relentless way he’d been working on the vodka.

  It was a volatile combination. The camp was defensible, which left the nyekulturny outlander as Vladislav’s major worry. Lowry hadn’t let loose of the shotgun all day and had been passing out insults ever since the battle. After-combat jitters, perhaps. Trying to convince everyone, especially himself, that he wasn’t afraid. Vladislav had seen the reaction before. Then Cass had gotten quiet. Vladislav expected trouble. Soon.

  The madman stood up and began to walk toward Natasha’s tent. What were his exact intentions? He was probably too drunk to know himself, beyond a raw desire to enter a tent that held two very attractive young women.

  Bernie stepped in front of him and said something. Vladislav didn’t quite understand the words he spoke, since his English was still poor. But it was obvious he was trying to deflect his fellow American.

  Lowry shoved Bernie away and said something Vladislav also didn’t understand. It was obviously rude; viciously so, Vladislav thought.

  More so than Bernie had expected. That was also obvious. Bernie had the disadvantage of being a sane and civilized man dealing with someone beyond those boundaries. The uncultured outlander’s shove had pushed him back and his foot slipped on some rocks.

  Vladislav stepped in. The shotgun had to go. He grabbed it from Cass and tossed it to one of his men, keeping the barrel pointed to the sky. Fighting man or not, valuable outlander or not, this one needed a lesson in manners. He hit Cass in the gut. Hard. Then in the face.

  Vladislav had been restraining both himself and his men with some difficulty. He had orders to treat the new American carefully. He actually did respect the courage of the man in combat, though no more than he respected Bernie’s cool-headed shooting or his own men’s courage and discipline. But now that Lowry was posing a clear threat to the knyazhna, he had crossed the lines.

  Lowry had gone down at the second blow but he was getting back up. He went for the pistol holstered at his side and Vladislav kicked him in the head. The American boor went down again.

  “I’ve been protecting Knyazhna Natasha since she was a child, little man.” The outlander might not have been little physically, but he had a little soul. “I can live with your uncultured ways if I have to…”

  Vladislav pulled Cass up from the ground, took the pistol out of the holster and set it on the table. Behind him, he heard Bernie talking to the guards. “Hey, guys, I can wait my turn, but at least let me watch.”

  His Russian had gotten quite good, idiomatic and almost fluent. Vladislav chuckled. Some of the guards must have thought Bernie was coming to the outlander’s defense.

  Still holding Cass by his collar, Vladislav said, “I can put up with your arrogance but you won’t lay a hand on her. Not if you want to keep that hand.” Vladislav hit him again.

  Cass flew into the table and made quite a racket going down this time. Then Natasha appeared.

  “What are you doing, Vladislav?” The noise had brought her from the tent. She was shouting. “And why are your men holding Bernie? Neither of these men is to be harmed. You know that. Let them go.”

  Vladislav let go of the outlander, who promptly fell on the ground, holding his guts, trying not to heave. The other guards let Bernie pass.

  Bernie took a few steps and bowed graciously to Vladislav. “I didn’t really mind waiting, Vladislav Vasl’yevich, but you might have left a bit more for me. Don’t worry about it, Natasha. Every man here has wanted to give Cass a lesson in manners from the moment he arrived. He’s earned this, in more ways than you know.”

  Bernie picked Cass up and leaned him against the handy cart, propping him carefully. Cass’ knees buckled and he went down again. “I do think you could have left me some, Vladislav. Considering it was me he pushed.”

  “I apologize, Bernie Janovich.” Vladislav bowed precisely. “But there was very little to it. I thought there would be more. Perhaps tomorrow.” Cass groaned.

  Natasha sniffed loudly and retreated to her tent. “Men!” She stopped at the entrance. “It has been a busy time and I do not read well in a sleigh. I have not had time to read any but the most essential messages from Grantville. We finally have an evening not filled with politics and you children decide to throw a brawl. Keep the noise down. I don’t wish to be disturbed again tonight.”

  Fifteen minutes later Bernie and Vladislav had arranged the semiconscious Cass on one of the carts. They were about to walk back to the fire when Natasha came storming out of the tent again. There was a letter in her hand.

  “You fool!” she shouted at Cass. “Why didn’t you tell me that my brother wishes to marry Brandy Bates?” Then she hit him.

  “Darn it!” Bernie complained, laughing. “I never get a turn.”

>   Of that charge, at least, Cass was innocent. He hadn’t known. He had left Grantville before Vladimir had sent the letter and it had caught up en route.

  Chapter 44

  December 1633

  “Vladimir sent a whole packet of letters with your car, Bernie, and even more of them with Cass,” Natasha said. “There’s more about the steam engines.” She handed Filip the booklet, since he spoke better German than Bernie.

  Filip started reading the booklet and less than a page in began to ask Bernie to define some of the terms. They went over the directions and the calculations in the booklet and called in a few more of their experts, and started working up a modified design for the steam barge engines. These new ones would have slightly tighter tolerances, more wood, less leather and be more powerful for their size. They would still, in essence, be low-pressure steam engines, but with this new information they felt they could push the envelope a little bit.

  “What are we going to do about Cass?” Natasha asked Bernie two days after that meeting. “He managed, just barely, to be polite to the czar. Other than that, he has offended everyone who has met him.”

  Bernie grinned. “Give him to the military. Specifically to the Streltzi bureau.” The Russia military was a weird mix of feudal duty and bureaucratic confusion. The bureaucratic nobility included the officers in time of war. They were the officer corps and the cavalry. The Streltzi were the infantry in time of war and the city guards in time of piece. One of the things that the Streltzi had picked up from Bernie was fingerprinting. By now most of the criminals in Moscow had had their fingerprints taken or paid considerable bribes to avoid it. The Streltzi hadn’t picked up on the notion of civil rights, though Bernie had offered it up. In the last few years, mercenary companies hired from the west had been added to the mix. The mercenaries who had a different way of fighting weren’t mixing in too well. “We get more requests from them than anyone else. Besides, it might do Cass some good to be surrounded by cops for a while.”

  Natasha was nodding. Bernie had been urgently called to various military bureaus over the last few months. Especially the Streltzi bureaus. The Streltzi preferred to fight behind walls, city walls. When they could not fight defensively behind the walls of a city they wanted to fight behind walking walls. The “stand and take it” philosophy of the western mercenary infantry was not in their traditions. They had no objection to dishing it out and did not lack courage, but standing in the open and taking it just seemed stupid. “Do you think it will work?”

  Bernie sighed “Maybe, but I doubt it. But worst case, it gets him out of our hair and gets the military bureaus off my back.”

  “So the Gun Shop will have their own up-timer.” Natasha laughed out loud. “Who knows? Maybe General Shein can handle him.”

  “I don’t care if he wants to fuck the czarina,” Mikhail Borisovich Shein said. “We have our own up-timer now, and he’s one who can fight.”

  His aide took it in stride. General Shein was a volatile man by nature. The calculation hidden by the volatility was harder to see; most people never did. “What should we do with him, sir?”

  “We do what Princess Natalia suggested. Assign him to the Gun Shop with Korisov.” The general snorted. “And keep him away from anyone important. Question him extensively, but not harshly. If that doesn’t work, we can use stronger measures. From what I understand, the main reason we got him is that he managed to miss out on, or fail at, the opportunities in Grantville. No one will miss him much.”

  The aide made a note and went on to the next item on the agenda. “The Streltzi are arguing with the outlander solders about their walking walls again.” The aide was a bureaucratic noble and therefore an officer in the Russian army. He didn’t think all that well of the foreign mercenary companies or the Streltzi — who, when not called to active service, made up the merchant class in Russia.

  The general gave him a cold look. Mikhail Borisovich Shein had commanded a force made up mostly of Streltzi at Smolensk during the last war with Poland. They had held out for twenty months against a force ten times their size. Whatever the traditional animosity between the two classes, General Shein didn’t share it. At the same time, he was fully conversant with the Russian army’s need to modernize. Slowly, he began to smile. “But what is ‘modernize’ in a world where we have people from the future? Find me two men, Georgi Ivanov. One outlander officer and a Streltzi. Send them to the Gun Shop. Put them in a room with the up-timer and let them argue about it. Even Korisov might have some thoughts on the matter.”

  Part Four

  The year 1634

  Chapter 45

  January 1634

  After some initial sparring, Cass and Andrei got along quite well. Each was convinced that he was the only person that mattered and each held the other in none-too-veiled contempt, but they were useful to each other and knew it. Andrei made sure Cass had access to a plentiful supply of young girls, vodka, hunting, and other sport. In return, Cass provided Andrei with a good, and in a way more up-to-date, up-timer knowledge base.

  Cass really was bright and his Russian was improving rapidly. He had lived in Grantville for a year and more after the Ring of Fire. A lot of tricks and workarounds had been developed in that time, so Cass was quite a bit more familiar with the how-to of building a modern tech base than most up-timers had been before the Ring of Fire. For instance:

  “What you need is a drop forge, Andy,” Cass said a few weeks after he had arrived at the Gun Shop. “Instead of building AK3’s by hand.”

  “A drop forge?” Andrei was none too fond of being addressed as “Andy,” but it wasn’t worth it to fight through his current hangover.

  “Yep. Take a big-ass weight. Lift it up about ten feet, then drop it. Force is mass times velocity, and by the time it hits, it has some velocity to multiply the big-ass weight.”

  “And how do you lift the big weight?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Look, a couple of peasants turning a crank will get the job done. Sure, a steam cylinder would do it faster and more efficiently, but you want to wait for those prigs at the Dacha to get around to providing you a steam ram?”

  That was a point. Andrei was increasingly upset by the way the Dacha was being corrupted by western notions. So he nodded and they worked on the design of the drop forge. A very hot piece of iron would be placed in the bottom form. Then the weighted top form would be dropped. After which four slaves would crank the weighted top form back up and the part would be removed.

  It would take four big, strong, men almost ten minutes to crank the “hammer” up to the top of its arch. During which time, another dollop of iron would be heated white hot. Wham! Another part.

  Not a completed part. The chambers had to be finished using a boring machine, also human-powered, this time two men on a stationary bicycle. The chamber locks, which on the AK3 were a lever-action made of several parts, would have the parts stamped out by drop forges, then be finished and assembled. The chambers were all of a standardized size. But Russian gunsmithing, up to this time, hadn’t focused at all on heavily standardized calibers. There just weren’t that many rifles in Russia that had precisely the same caliber of barrel. So the new guns almost had to come out of the Gun Shop, which, when it came down to it, suited both Andrei and Cass just fine.

  All this took time and it wasn’t the only thing they were working on. The czar, the patriarch, and Sheremetev wanted cannon. Good cannon. Breech-loading cannon. Cass told them they couldn’t do it, that they didn’t have the quality of steel needed for up-time cannon.

  Andrei, a fairly bright guy in his own right, wanted to know why.

  “Strength and flexibility,” Cass told him. “Modern metals are produced using precise mixes of elements: just enough carbon, just enough tungsten, just enough chromium, for a weight of steel heated to just the right heat for just the right amount of time.”

  After some consideration, Andrei asked, “What has to be strong and what has to be flexible?”

&nb
sp; The question brought Cass Lowry up short. The whole damn thing had to be strong and had to have some flexibility which was why you didn’t make cast iron cannons. But he got the point. They had muzzle-loading cannons down-time. They apparently made them strong enough and flexible enough so that they didn’t blow up all that often. What aspect of an up-time cannon had to have fancy modern steel? “I’d say it’s probably the breech mechanism,” he said after a pause. “Modern cannon use an interrupted-screw breech lock.”

  “And how does that work?”

  Cass described the way the screw had parts of the threading cut out of it so that it could be slid into the breech, which also had parts of its threading cut out and ended with, “You see, the threads of the breech and of the breechblock have to be really strong and take a tremendous amount of force.”

  “Yes, I see,” Andrei said. “But you wouldn’t need an interruption if you didn’t have lots of threads. That is right, yes?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “So why can’t you add more threads to the interrupted screw to compensate for the weaker metals that we have now?”

  Cass didn’t know and hated admitting it.

  “We will experiment. We will make interrupted-screw breech locks and see how well they withstand the force of firing.”

  “Fine, as long as you know I won’t be standing anywhere near them when we do the test firing.”

  Andrei shrugged. “That’s what slaves are for.”

  Chapter 46

  February 1634

  Filip and Gregorii looked over the new steam barge design before they sealed the packet.

  The more standardized design the Dacha had developed after looking over Vladimir’s notes was two ten-inch-wide cylinders side-by-side, with the stroke of the first setting the second and vice versa, to produce a reciprocating engine. They didn’t bother with a condenser on the ones for the steamboats and steam barges, as there was generally water available in a river. So they released the steam to the same chimney that carried the smoke fire. They used a pot boiler and ceramic tiles for the fire bed. The engines built that way-and especially the boilers-were so inefficient that they were an insult to steam power. However, they would fit on a thirty-foot-long, ten-foot-wide river barge and they would push the thing through the water.