1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  “What do you think?” asked Iakov Petrovich Birkin, his cousin and second in command. “Shall we spank little Timmy for his effrontery?”

  “Probably. I know that the boy was in trouble with General Izmailov after the battle at Rzhev, but I didn’t get the details. On the other hand, he was the general’s fair-haired boy up to then.”

  “Who cares? He’s only…nineteen, isn’t it…and he has almost no real experience. He spent all his time playing games in the Kremlin.”

  General Prince Ivan Vasilevich Birkin didn’t say anything. He had said similar things and believed them himself. He still believed them. The war games that the up-timers Bernie and Cass had introduced to the generals at the Kremlin were just that, games. They had nothing to do with facing sword and shot in a real battle. They were at best exercises, and at worst the sort of foolishness that made every idiot clerk think he was the equal of a soldier. But General Shein had doted on the things for some reason. And if Shein was under a cloud for his political position, he was still an excellent general. And General Izmailov had been frankly brilliant in his siege of Rzhev and in the final battle where they had taken the place. All in all, it was a lot easier to criticize the antics of people like that when you didn’t have an army to command. He tried to shake off the mood. “How are we set for chambers?”

  “Well, Cousin, the gun shop has been delivering more since Lowry died. It’s certain that he was diverting much of the output to his purse. I had a little talk with Andrei Korisov and made it clear that if we didn’t get what we needed, we would be testing our rifles on him.”

  “What about the cannon?”

  “Not so good. He insists that until he gets better steel, he will have to make the breech blocks heavy to compensate for the weakness.” Iakov Petrovich grimaced. “He’s probably right, anyway.”

  The army had twelve rifled twelve-pounders. They were breech-loading but the breeches weighed too much for easy, or rapid, reloading. On the other hand, the carriages were excellent, so he didn’t expect the cannon to slow him that much. Not in comparison to the Streltzi infantry that would be coming with the army. “All right, then. We have our orders from the director-general. We march next week.”

  Besides, Ivan Vasilevich told himself, Czar Mikhail and his boy general had had to leave their entire industrial base at the Dacha and Murom. He wouldn’t be facing breech-loading cannon. Half of Little Timmy’s army would be carrying bows and arrows, and the rest mostly muzzle-loading matchlocks.

  “Yes, Cousin. What about Andrei Fefilatevich Danilov’s riverboat scheme?”

  “Let him try it. If he can knock Little Timmy out of Kazan before we get there, so much the better.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The Northern Route

  TwinLo Park, outside Grantville

  August 1636

  “Good afternoon, Your Highness,” said Brent Partow. “Let me start by introducing you to Captain John Adams. No relation to the founding father of the USA, at least none that we know of.”

  “Captain?” Prince Vladimir Gorchakov offered his hand, but looked to Ron Stone to tell him what was going on.

  Ron shrugged in shared confusion. “I mentioned your problems to Trent the other day because Twinlo is good at finding solutions. Since I was back in Grantville for a visit, he called me yesterday and asked if I could bring you out to see a possible solution.”

  “Herr Partow?” Vladimir asked.

  “Cap, here, is a retired sea captain and a down-time naval architect. But he’s spent the last couple of years in Grantville trying to learn about up-time ship design. He wants to build ships and he’s actually been to Mangazeya, and not that long before it was shut down. I got to talking with him about an ice breaker and he thinks he may have a solution.”

  “You have my full attention, Captain Adams,” Vladimir said, and Ron nodded his agreement.

  “Well, a steel hull is out of the question, of course. I shudder just thinking how much that amount of steel would cost. It’s also not really necessary. The Pomors, the Russian settlers up there in the far north, have a two-masted ship called a ‘koch’ that is fairly good at making its way through the ice. They are small, though. Less than a hundred tons usually. When I looked up ‘icebreakers’ in the state library, I learned that much of their design is not exactly taken from the koch hulls, but more grew out of them.”

  Vladimir nodded and the captain, seeing no objections, continued. “The arctic kochs have a rounded design below the waterline, so that if they get caught the ice will push them out without doing too much damage. And if you just added a steam engine to such a design, you would have something that would mostly work…if the ice wasn’t too thick. I don’t think they would work in hard winter, though. For that I think you will need something to break the ice. And I think I have that thing.”

  Vladimir looked around and saw Brent Partow grinning like he was about to hear the punch line to a joke, and Vladimir started to get nervous.

  “After I got to Grantville and saw a bulldozer, I got interested in tracked vehicles and continuous track vehicles.”

  Yes, Vladimir thought, the joke is definitely on me.

  “I was impressed by the paddle wheels on your riverboats, but they are awfully big for the paddles. That’s a lot of extra weight to drag through the water. So I thought about using continuous track rather than wheels to put the paddles on. I researched it and learned that while military tracked vehicles like tanks use treads that are integral to the chain, civilian ones like on bulldozers have removable treads that can be changed out without damage to the chain.”

  “Excuse me, Captain, but what does—” Vladimir started.

  “Give him a minute, Your Highness,” Brent Partow interrupted. “It does all fit together and you do need the background. It’s a new system and it has more than one application. But until Ron brought me the question about icebreakers, the uncertainties outweighed any potential benefits. One of the drawbacks of tracks is that they tear up the ground…and that’s precisely what you want in an icebreaker. So hold your questions till the captain has a chance to explain, please.”

  Vladimir looked over at Ron Stone, who nodded, then shrugged and waved the captain to continue. Captain Adams kept talking, and his ideas did hang together, at least as harebrained schemes went. Vladimir was familiar with kochs, though he didn’t know them as well as Captain Adams apparently did.

  This might work. Maybe.

  After the meeting, when Vladimir talked it over with Ron, they agreed that it was at least worth a try. The ship Captain Adams wanted would be a three-masted koch-style sailing ship with steam engines. It would carry five hundred tons of useful cargo, aside from engines and fuel. Which would make it a lot bigger than any koch yet built, but not bigger than ships already being built by the shipyards in Hamburg.

  “With luck we’ll be able to find something already under construction, but not so far along that we can’t modify the designs,” Ron told Vladimir. “I’ll telegraph our agent, Kristof Klein, and have him see what he can find.”

  Brandy was working on the patent application for the chamber-loading rifle when Vladimir got back to Russia House. Part of the agreement that Vlad had made with Czar Mikhail was that the Gorchakov family would get the international patents to anything independently developed by the Dacha. And, depending on how you interpreted the contract, anything developed with Dacha input. Since Sheremetev had become director-general, there had been a number of challenges to those patents. Mostly from people who owed fealty to the Sheremetev clan or one of the clans that supported them. Brandy had ended up in charge of fighting those claims.

  “Are Russian lawyers worse than German lawyers?” Brandy asked as Vlad came in.

  “Isn’t that a bit like asking which lightless cave is darker?”

  Brandy grinned and kissed him on the cheek. “More like which avalanche is heavier. And the only honest answer is ‘the one I’m under.’”

  “Besides, didn’t the Russian
embassy hire a German law firm?”

  “Yes, but never mind that. How did your meeting with Ron and Brent go?”

  “John Adams wants to send a tank across the polar ice to Russia.”

  “John Adams?”

  Suddenly Vladimir remembered Brent Partow’s comment. “Not that John Adams. A real person from our time. He’s an Englishman, a captain and a ship designer. Apparently some friend of Brent Partow’s.”

  “Okay. What was that about a tank?”

  So Vladimir told her about his meeting with Ron, Brent and Captain Adams. Then she told him about the ongoing legal wrangling with the embassy in Magdeburg about which of them was the legitimate representative of Russia. It was important, though not quite as important as it might become later, since the up-time notions of diplomatic immunity and diplomatic status in general were still in their infancy and not fully recognized by the USE.

  Then they went in to have dinner. By now Brandy was used to being Princess Brandy Gorchakovna, with all that entailed. They went in to see little Mikey. They had named the baby Mikhail Vladimirovich and left it for history to decide whether Vlad named him after Czar Mikhail or Brandy named him after Mike Stearns. He was happily playing with his milk sister, Branya, under the supervision of Branya’s mother, Eva Mateevna. They played with little Mikey for a few minutes, while they continued to chat about the situation in Russia.

  They were behind the curve, but between Boris’ sons and Fedor Ivanovich Trotsky—who was loyal to Vladimir because his family was on the outs with one of the clans on Sheremetev’s side—they had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Or at least what had been going on a month or so ago. “By now the army is probably on the march and the last report that the dirigible provides says that there is a steady flow of serfs and a trickle of Streltzi and minor nobility to Czar Mikhail’s colors,” Vladimir said.

  “Which won’t do much good, unless we can get them arms and the tools to start up an industrial base,” Brandy said. “In freaking Siberia, of all places.”

  It was an old discussion that they had gone over again and again in the last months. Czar Mikhail’s loyal people needed tools and they needed something to pull the lower nobility away from Director-General Sheremetev. Vladimir didn’t see how Czar Mikhail could hold out with just a bunch of runaway serfs on his side.

  CHAPTER 10

  On the River

  July to September 1636, on the road

  By the end of July, the villagers of Ruzuka were on the north side of the Klyazma River again, approaching the Volga. The crops, most of which had been planted before Czar Mikhail’s flight, were getting ripe and the villages were short of people. The radiotelegraph net had made rumor even faster—if not noticeably more accurate.

  The operators looked out for one another. They also had a set of skills that made them difficult to replace. So the network carried the official messages but it also carried unofficial messages: what radio operators had seen or heard, private mail that was often encoded. Also, while it was by no means universal, the radio operators had what Sheremetev and his faction were likely to see as a liberal bias. They were almost universally literate, they had mostly been trained at the Dacha, so had been exposed to the corrupting influence of Bernie Zeppi and the up-timer books.

  Which meant that even little villages out in the middle of nowhere were generally informed on the events of the day. Czar Mikhail had established himself in Ufa. He had sent the dirigible scouting, and even flown over Moscow. No one knew if Mikhail himself had been in the dirigible when it flew over Moscow in mid-July, but that the dirigible had done so was clear. And, according to rumor, it had sent Sheremetev into a rage.

  Serfs were running east in droves and every time the dirigible went over, more ran. So at least the headman of Shalaevo, a village thirty miles west of the Volga, complained. Elena listened as politely as she could. She was, somewhat against her will, acting as the face for the village. With Stefan and Anatoly standing over her, there wasn’t much she could do except what they told her. She was really afraid now that they would leave her in the forest.

  Elena, with Stefan looking over her shoulder, told the headman of Shalaevo, “Stefan, here, will negotiate with you for my serfs’ help with your harvest.” Then she retreated to the wagon.

  The headman knew he needed their help in bringing in the crop, in exchange for which he offered a small part of the seed. But the bandits from Ruzuka had him over a barrel and they clearly knew it. Almost a quarter of the crop was the price they settled on. And, like any bandit would, they insisted that the seed they were taking be threshed first, because the people of Shalaevo would be able to do the rest of the threshing over the winter.

  The people of Ruzuka spent two weeks in Shalaevo, then another two weeks in the next village on their way, and a week and a half in a third. By the time they were done, they had almost as much grain as they would have if they had stayed home. Harvest season was winding down. It was September now, and the villagers of Ruzuka made their way to the Volga.

  September 1636

  As Stefan rode up to the shore of the Volga, he heard the boatmen singing. Born and raised in Russia, still Stefan had never heard a song more depressing. “Pull, pull, pull some more,” in tones of ultimate despair. There were now steam barges on the Volga, but they were still by far the minority. There were big boats on the Volga, almost ships, and large crews of the very poor to haul them up the river. Talking to the burlak, the boatmen who pulled the boats upriver by means of ropes attached to the boats and tied around their upper arms and chests, he learned where the boats put in. It was fall and cold, and the boats were not doing nearly as well as their owners had expected because a good number of the burlak had run off to join the czar at Ufa.

  Balakhna was one of the stopping points for the boats. Stefan rode in and found Boris Petrovich, a factor for the boat owners that one of the burlak had told him about.

  “Yes, we can take you downriver,” Boris told Stefan. “How many people do you have and how much equipment? Downriver is better than upriver at this time of year. It needs fewer pullers.”

  They talked price and came to an agreement, some in paper money but mostly in silver and jewelry. Then Stefan went out and brought in the wagons. It would take two days to get all the gear loaded onto the ship.

  Balakhna

  Nikita Ivanovich Utkin shifted in his saddle. His butt hurt, but at least they were back in town. He looked over at Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov and grinned. The other man looked just as tired as he felt. They were followed by a platoon of soldiers, most of whom were still armed with single-shot muzzleloaders or even pikes. Nikita and Alexander each had AK4s, and Nikita wore a bandolier of chambers as a part of his outfit. Alexander insisted that uniform was not the right word when it was unique, and Nikita had to concede that there weren’t two outfits in the platoon that were alike.

  Nikita looked back at the docks, and saw a crowd of peasants with wagons and ponies. It looked like this group of runaways had stolen their master blind. Well, he and Alexander would harry them back the way they had come. And if some of their goods got left here for him to pick up, so much the better.

  Nikita pointed, and Alexander looked. “More game. And right here in Balakhna.”

  “They are going to have to be disassembled, Father.” Stefan was talking to Father Yulian about the stowing of the wagons. “They take up too much room. We will pull off the wheels and take off the sides and roofs…”

  “Oh, my God,” Izabella said. “It’s Nikita.”

  Stefan looked up and felt his face pale. Nikita was a stuck-up little bastard. Full of himself and convinced that his lordly birth entitled him to pretty much anything he wanted. He had been a pain in the ass and a real danger from the day Stefan had met him…and he was riding in their direction, armed and with troops behind him.

  On the other hand, the villagers of Ruzuka weren’t the same people they had been. They hadn’t been attacked since Gorki, but that was onl
y because ever since Gorki they had maintained an alert guard. By now, every adult in the wagon train was armed with something and those who were carrying guns at least had a decent idea how to use them.

  Stefan wasn’t any good with the guns, but he had a large knife in his belt and he could use it. It was hidden by the coat he wore, but he could reach it if he had to. And, knowing Nikita, he was very much afraid that he was about to have to.

  As he watched, Nikita’s face changed as he recognized them. Nikita kicked his horse, ignoring the rest of the troops that were with him and rode at Stefan and the rest like he was going to ride them down.

  He pulled up when he got to them and leapt off the horse, shouting, “What the hell are you doing here? Father has been worried sick ever since he got the message from Kiril Ivanovich.” He grabbed Izabella’s arm and that opened her coat, making the fact of her pregnancy blatantly apparent.