1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  The man got in and pulled off his peaked cap. It was fur-lined, and he was bald under it except for a red scalp lock.

  The guy also took off his outer fur, and in the warmth of the enclosed sleigh, he was quite aromatic. Rancid reindeer grease, at a guess.

  Unfortunately, their guest wasn’t the one who spoke Russian, and neither Bernie nor Natasha spoke Mongol. Assuming that was the language the guy spoke. By the time they got to the village, Bernie was ready to ride on the roof of the sleigh.

  He opened the door and looked out at the village. “Hey, teepees?” And they were. Not all of them. There were a variety of structures in the village, but several of them were, for all intents and purposes, teepees. Except for the feathered headdress of movies and TV, these guys might almost be American Indians. Bows, horses, the works. But, no. There was also steel—or at least iron—armor and swords.

  They spent two days with the Tangu, and in the course of their talks with the tribal elders they mentioned that they were going to Mangazeya to meet Natasha’s brother and his up-timer wife, who were coming to Russia to discuss with Czar Mikhail how to produce a constitution that would give all the people of Russia a say in their own government.

  At that point, the Tangu elders got very interested and they ended up with a Tangu elder and an interpreter coming along. From what their translator said, the local tribe was going to be sending messages to its associated clans. By the time they got back on the road, it sounded to Bernie like the Mongol equivalent of Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse would be sitting in on the constitutional convention. At least, that was how it was going to work if there was still a czar in Ufa when they got back. General Shein hadn’t had much faith that Tim could hold out in Kazan.

  Kazan

  February 1637

  “It’s trench warfare,” Ivan told Tim. He had slipped out of Sviyazhsk without much trouble. The lines were formed and it was easy enough for an individual to sneak through the lines.

  “It’s not,” Tim disagreed. “I mean, it’s not like we have lines twenty miles long. We have trenches and bastions around Kazan. You have them at Sviyazhsk.” Tim pointed out the window at the small fortified city across the frozen river. “And General Birkin has them around his camp.”

  A grin twitched Ivan’s face. “It was fun watching them chop their defensive lines out of the frozen earth.”

  “What’s the word from Moscow?” Tim asked. Over the course of the winter, new radio stations had been installed between Sviyazhsk on the Kruglaya mountain and Nizhny Novgorod, and exchanges of information had begun. There were now radio operators running their own network, and left alone by both sides because of their utility.

  “Not much,” Ivan said. “Sheremetev is raising a bigger army and putting together siege engines. I don’t think he is going to be able to get them here before the spring thaw.”

  There were two military campaign seasons in Russia, summer and winter. And two seasons you couldn’t campaign in, spring and fall. In spring, the melting snow and ice turned Russia into a muddy swamp. And in fall, the rains did the same thing. But in summer or winter, the rivers made excellent transportation conduits. They were nearing the end of the winter combat season, and that brought them back to Ivan’s point about World War I. The machine guns they and Sheremetev had were more analogous to the Gatling guns of the American Civil War than the machine guns of World War I. They were an outgrowth of the AK4.7, also created by Andrei Korisov. To give the devil his due, Korisov was a brilliant innovator in the field of firearms. And from what Tim had heard, devil was an altogether too apt a description of the man. That had one great advantage to Czar Mikhail. Almost every serf or slave employed in the gun shop, and better than half the Streltzi who had worked in the gun shop, had run east, and a lot of them had made their escape good. Most of those people were in Ufa and Kazan now, making AK4.7 Korisov guns and the tools to make breech-loading cannon. It would be a while before they got breech-loading cannon, but they were already making Korisov guns.

  The Korisov gun used a large clip of caplock chambers and a crank to move the chambers and cock the hammer. They worked, but being black powder weapons, they tended to foul quickly and had to be taken out of action for cleaning or risk a jam and an exploding gun. And, having a single barrel, couldn’t be fired as fast. A Korisov gun couldn’t put more than a hundred and fifty rounds a minute down range without severe danger to the gunners. The new artillery was much superior to anything the seventeenth century had known before the Ring of Fire, but wasn’t up to the standards of World War I artillery. Besides, Birkin only had a few of the new guns and Tim didn’t yet have any cannon made since the Ring of Fire. But that didn’t matter, because they had rifles that combined long range with a good rate of fire.

  The mass charge was over, and if Sheremetev hadn’t learned that, Birkin had. For the past two months they had been doing nothing but maintaining their lines. And it looked like it was going to stay that way till after the spring run off dried.

  “Are you sure, Ivan? There is still almost a month for Sheremetev to bring up his new army.”

  “I almost hope he does, General. It would be a repeat of what happened to Ivan the Terrible in 1548, when the ice melted under his army and his siege engines sank.”

  “Unless we get a cold spell,” Tim said, then waved a hand in negation. “Pay no attention. It’s being stuck here all winter with nothing to do but fortify and fortify some more.”

  “And dodge the enticements of every marriageable girl in Kazan,” Ivan said with a grin. “They are a greater danger than Birkin’s army.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Federation?

  Moscow

  February 1637

  Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev watched the army leaving from the Kremlin wall. It had been a hard winter for him as well. He had spent it trying to keep his nation from dissolving as Mikhail sucked the workers from farms and towns all over Russia, and Cossacks on the Don River were talking about declaring independence from Russia and Poland. Archangelsk declared independence, as well, and his only link to the up-timer knowledge was now through Polish back channels or whatever access the Swedes allowed.

  The good news was out of the gun shop. They had improved steel for the breeches and breech-locks and improved cartridges. His intent as he had raised this army was to send it to reinforce Birkin and finally take Kazan, opening the way to Ufa. But now that was going to have to be put off, possibly for another year. He had to take Archangelsk back. He had to have his own port. Independent access to the rest of the world, especially the USE and its books. So the army that should be marching east was going to march north instead.

  The one thing that Patriarch Filaret had been right about was that Russia could no longer be a nation in seclusion, walled off from the rest of the world.

  Fedor turned back into the Kremlin and to the always increasing round of paperwork that filled his days. The bureau men pretended to be cowed, but they constantly threw up roadblocks of paper. Every sheet was a list of excuses, whining about why they couldn’t do their jobs. And the purges he had used over the fall to force them to obedience had cost him too many of the bureau men. It turned out that the files still had to be filed, even if you killed the uppity clerks.

  Grantville Section, Embassy Bureau, Moscow

  Boris Ivanovich Petrov decoded the latest message from his son in Ufa. It was a fairly clear description of who had gone over to Czar Mikhail. It was also encoded using the family pad. A set of five number groups that designated, book, page line and word. The fifth number indicated length of phrase, So 3, 15, 6, 2, 2 indicated the fifteenth page of the boyar book, the sixth line, the second and third words on that line. Which were “Yuri Mikhailovich.” The next group G, 125, 32, 5, 1 was the G volume of the Dacha encyclopedia, the one hundred and twenty-fifth page, the thirty-second line, and the fifth word. Which, as it happened, was Tupikov. Yuri Mikhailovich Tupikov was now in Ufa. That was interesting. Yuri was a fairly staid sort in the Roads
Bureau, not the sort that Boris would have thought of as…No, wait. Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev, the director-general’s cousin, had been playing with the roads budget again. Yuri might have had to run for his life.

  The next code group started them on a new subject. The craftsmen of Ufa, who were mostly the refugees from the Dacha and Murom with a leavening of the refugees from Kazan, were using induction to melt iron and make steel. It was still very small scale, but one of the advantages of doing it that way was that they didn’t have to build a whole factory to make a few pounds of steel. It was more suitable to the making of small quantities of good steel. That was something that they had picked up on at the Dacha in 1634. The important thing, as far as Boris was concerned, was that it was still more evidence that an industrial base was developing in the east faster than it had in the Dacha. That surprised Boris, but as he thought about it, it made sense. They had been teaching people how to use chemistry and electricity for the past five years and more. There were a lot of people who had the basics by now.

  Each of Director-General Sheremetev’s purges had pushed more of the skilled craftsmen, whether Streltzi or minor nobility, to defect to Czar Mikhail. In fact, given other circumstances, Boris might have taken his wife and run for it. But he was in a crucial position. He got information from the USE, and through his son Ivan, he got word of the happenings in the east. That let him provide private information to a number of bureau men who were worried about family members who had gone missing. The bureaus were a world of traded favors, and Boris was in a position to trade a number of them. It was dangerous to live and work in Moscow these days, but Boris had been a field agent for most of his life and the danger made him feel at home.

  “Yuri, see if Ivan Alexovich Tupikov is free sometime today. And see what’s happening in the Dacha with induction forging,” Boris hollered out the door of his office. “Let’s see if we can send something to Iosef to patent in the USE.”

  “Da!” Yuri called back. “Did you hear they will be launching the new dirigible soon?”

  “How soon?”

  “A week, maybe less.”

  The Grantville section had agents in the dirigible works. It was new tech, after all, and there had been several innovations in the field of making dirigibles developed at Bor. Boris had been able to follow the redesign of the dirigibles at Bor and the development of the D’iak-class dirigible. He also managed, through the Goritsky Monastery, to send copies of the new design to Ufa. It was a good design. The D’iak had almost neutral buoyancy at take off, and got some of their lift aerodynamically. It was a new design and Boris didn’t know if anyone had tried anything like it up-time. That new design offered a lot of possible patents in the USE.

  That too was part of Boris’ job, getting foreign credit for Russia. Russia was perennially broke and now that it was in five or more bleeding pieces, it was more broke than ever. Boris really wished that Czar Mikhail had stayed in that damned hunting lodge. He wished that Bernie and Natasha were still in the Dacha making stuff, rather than wherever they were.

  Goritsky Monastery

  The ladies of the monastery watched the army marching by in something close to shock. What had possessed the man? Sheremetev had sent his army in the wrong direction. To attack Archangelsk made no sense at all. Mikhail was the threat. The consensus was almost total. “Sheremetev is insane.”

  Ludmila was not convinced. She knew Sheremetev. Stuffed shirt, he might be. Egomaniac, yes, definitely. But maniac? No.

  That left her with the question, what did Sheremetev know that she didn’t?

  Even before the army had passed out of sight of the monastery, she was closeted with Sofia and several of the other sisters, trying to figure out what they had missed. It was hard, and took them weeks to figure out because it wasn’t a single thing, but several factors. First, from Sofia, she got the prices of mica capacitors in Grantville. They were higher than she had thought. Then, from Tatyana Dolmatov-Karpov, she got the prices that the Polish merchants were paying for mica and it was lower. Rather a lot lower than it should be.

  The difference in prices wasn’t just because the Sheremetev family was raking off a fortune. The Polish merchants were ripping them off too. And so were the Lithuanian magnates they were having to ship the stuff through, to keep from shipping it through the Swedish enclave. Which they had to do to keep it out of the lawsuits that Vladimir Gorchakov had introduced in the USE.

  From Elena Cherakasky, Tatyana learned that some of the information that the Poles had provided was falsified or distorted. When that was all put together, it meant that Sheremetev needed a route into the USE and its libraries that was not controlled by Sweden or Poland.

  By the time they had gone through the books and papers and put it all together, Archangelsk was besieged. The local government of Archangelsk had made the same erroneous calculation the ladies of the monastery made. They had started with assuming that Sheremetev would be too busy with Mikhail to trouble them, and the price for that miscalculation was going to be high.

  And that was the other piece of information they had missed. It was entirely possible, even probable, that even that second army would have failed to get to Ufa this year. That would have left Sheremetev with all his forces tied up in an indecisive campaign in the southeast while the whole Russian empire fragmented around him, with each apparently successful revolt encouraging the next.

  Archangelsk would make an excellent example of the cost of rebellion.

  Mangazeya

  March 1637

  The Gateway to the World! Bernie thought. Then, Yeah, right. He was feeling just a bit testy. Over two freaking thousand miles of travel and he and Natasha still couldn’t get together. The frustration was about to kill him.

  Mangazeya was two hundred plus miles up the Taz estuary from the Gulf of Ob. And Bernie couldn’t quite figure out why anyone would put a town here. Yes, he could. It was far enough off the direct route so that it was inconvenient to the customs agents, but close enough so that the smugglers didn’t need to go too far out of their way to get here.

  And, in Mangazeya, there was Sir William Blake. A stocky, bearded man who dressed like a Russian and spoke Shakespearian English, he was a fur trader and he was quite illegally shipping Russian furs and pearls and other things out of Siberia to England every summer. About the only thing that war in Russia meant to Billy Boy was the possibility of grabbing a chunk of Russia to turn into the arctic version of twentieth-century Hong Kong. A British territory in Russia. Of which he would be the viceroy.

  Fortunately, Billy Boy wasn’t the only voice in Mangazeya, just the most obnoxious. There was a faction that wanted to stay in Russia and a faction that wanted to start their own country. There were the natives, who were the core of the separatists. The Pomors were the core of the “stay in Russia” group. The “join England” faction were the smallest group but the richest, and mostly consisted of English merchants and their families. They were still arguing about it when the Catherine the Great arrived.

  “More teepees,” Brandy told little Mikey, who was bundled up in heavy furs, but still not happy to be out in the cold.

  The Catherine had been collecting wood enroute for some time and everyone was tired and looking forward to a rest. Also, the Catherine wasn’t breaking the ice at this point. It was traveling on the ice, using its false keel as a skid and the continuous track and engines to get where it was going.

  They would stop here and do repairs before any further travel. The Catherine pulled up beside a frozen dock and they ran out the gangplank.

  Brandy looked at the town of Mangazeya and felt like she’d been transported to yet another time. Which was helped along, when—of all people—Bernie Zeppi, wrapped in a fur robe, walked up to her, held up his right hand and said, “How.”

  Brandy started laughing and Vladimir looked confused. The woman next to Bernie, who must be Vlad’s sister Natasha, rolled her eyes. Apparently she had heard about the joke beforehand. Then Vladimir hugg
ed the woman and swung her to meet Brandy.

  “Come on, everyone. Let’s get in out of the cold,” Bernie said. “I would have used a feather, but all they have up here is penguin feathers.”

  “Aren’t penguins from the south pole?” Brandy asked.

  “Never let the facts stand in the way of a good line,” Bernie told her. “I have no idea, but I haven’t seen any of them. Now, let’s get inside before I freeze my feathers off.”

  The got inside and John Adams renewed his acquaintance with Billy Boy. The discussion went back to who would own Mangazeya and the rest of Siberia, especially points farther east. The Catherine was capable of making the trip, but she was just one ship and with the amount of fuel and effort involved, even considering what they had learned, there was some question of whether she could make the return trip before the summer thaw. More crucially, there simply wasn’t enough population density this far north to mount any serious defense against any invader, whether from the south or the sea.

  Vladimir called his sister aside. “Is this what you’ve been dealing with?”

  “Yes, and not just here. In Tobolsk too. And the Don Cossacks are making noises about forming their own nation, as well. I understand Archangelsk has declared independence.”

  “I wasn’t convinced till we got here, but perhaps Brandy and President Piazza are right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “Perhaps what we need is a federal system.” It wasn’t the first time this had come up, but especially among the bureaus there was a great deal of resistance to the notion. They were afraid of having their bureaucratic regulations challenged by local governments, which was hardly something unheard of.