1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  “Ufa? Where is that?”

  “Way the hell off east of here. Nick—that’s Colonel Slavenitsky, the captain of the Czarina Evdokia—” Garry hooked a thumb at the dirigible hanging over them “—says it’s sixteen hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, but we caught a crosswind last night, so we traveled closer to seventeen hundred.”

  “When did you leave Ufa?”

  “Yesterday morning. It took us a little more than a day and a half. On the other hand, we’re getting pretty low on fuel. You guys have any firewood or coal?”

  They delivered the mail and bought some fire wood. The garrison didn’t have any coal. Gerry climbed back up the ladder and they headed back.

  On the road out of Bor

  “Well, General, what happens next?” Ivan Maslov asked. They were still in sight of Nizhny Novgorod and had picked up some Streltzi to swell their ranks. They also had quite a few techs from the dirigible works at Bor.

  “We go to Ufa. I told you that.”

  “Not what I mean,” Ivan said. Then, quietly, “Tim, we’re going to be fighting a war. We have the AKs and so do the boyars back in Moscow. The army we are facing will have a better rate of fire than the USE troops. Even the AK3 will give them that. Maybe not as good as the French Cardinal rifles, but better than the German SRGs. When you add in the new clips of the point sevens, we’ll be as fast or faster than the Cardinals. Also, these are almost universally rifled guns. They have accurate range out to three or four hundred yards.” Ivan pointed at the AK4 Long, strapped diagonally across his back. It was a fifty caliber heavy chamber with a long barrel. “With a mount and scope, I can hit a man at six hundred yards most of the time.”

  “Most people won’t be able to…”

  “I know. But most people will be able to hit a man-size target at three hundred yards. Two hundred, even with the carbines. That’s four times the range and you know the lectures we got on the American Civil War and World War I. It’s going to be a slaughter.”

  “I know. But unless you have a tank in your rucksack, I’m not at all sure what to do about it.”

  “Dig the Maginot Line across Russia,” Ivan said, but there wasn’t much conviction in his voice.

  Tim shook his head. “There aren’t enough people, much less soldiers, in Russia to man a line even as long as the Maginot was, much less the sort of line we would need for Russia. A trench from the Arctic to the Black Sea. If we did nothing else, it would take years.”

  “I know. But we have to think of something. You and me, we have to figure out the doctrine for the new war. Not the older and wiser heads. You and—”

  “Wait a minute. General Izmailov is good and so—”

  “What really happened at Rzhev, Tim?”

  Tim stopped. It was a deep, dark secret. Or it had been. But maybe now was the time to tell it. “I usurped General Izmailov’s authority to move the volley guns. There was no advanced planning or approval from the general, just me acting on my own.”

  “Well, why not just say so?” Ivan asked.

  “Because it wasn’t long after that asshole Ivan Khilkov led our cavalry into a prepared pike formation and got them slaughtered. He’d been able to do it because he had a greater mestnichestvo. And I do too. If it had come out that I acted without orders, it would have been used as an excuse for any noble asshole to ignore the orders of his superior officer any time he wanted to.”

  “With all respect, Tim, you guys never needed an excuse.” Ivan stopped. “Oh, I get it. Khilkov used his mestnichestvo to make General Izmailov let him loose, then screwed up by the numbers. The general didn’t want your actions to provide a counterexample.”

  “Yes. He and Czar Mikhail, General Shein…they all wanted it kept very quiet. My uncle knows, but he agrees with the czar, at least on this.”

  “It also goes to why Czar Mikhail made you the general.”

  “No. It was just that he didn’t have anyone else handy,” Tim said. “Don’t make too much of it. He had to leave, we had to fight a rearguard action to get him loose, and no one he had handy at the time had much in the way of real world experience. It’s not like General Shein was available.”

  “All I have to say, Tim, is maybe he was lucky Shein was up in Tobolsk,” Ivan said. “But it still means we have to figure out how to fight a modern war.”

  “Not necessarily. It’s six hundred miles to Ufa. We’ll probably be safely dead before anyone asks us what to do.”

  “General,” a voice from back in the line yelled. “There’s a steamboat coming up the river. What should we do?”

  Ivan started laughing.

  CHAPTER 3

  On the road

  Goritsky Monastery

  July 1636

  Sofia Gorchakovna got off the steamboat and looked around. Sister Sofia, that is, she thought. And she was in the company of Sister Elena, Dimitri Cherakasky’s widow. Elena was dealing not just with the prospect of being forced to take holy orders, but also the death of her husband.

  They were escorted by a small contingent of oprichniki under the command of a seventeen-year-old lieutenant, Vasilii Golitsyn. The boy had been polite enough. Sofia looked at the stiff little snot with the wisps of beard and the silver dog head collar tab and said, “Remember. Tell your grandfather I said he is being foolish.”

  The boy didn’t sigh, not quite. Instead, he waved Elena and Sofia to the carriage that would take them to the monastery. Convent, as the westerners would call it. Goritsky Monastery was halfway to Archangelsk from Moscow as the crow or dirigible flew, and considerably more than halfway as the steam boat floated. It was in the hinterlands and a good place to put inconvenient upper-class women of all sorts.

  Sofia looked over at Elena. The woman had been taken from her home the day after her husband’s death, shipped to the Dacha where Sofia had been picked up, then shipped by steamboat downriver to the Volga and then upriver to the monastery. Over a thousand miles and twelve days. The shock had worn off and all that was left was the fury. Fury at Dimitri for getting his fool self killed, fury at Sheremetev for killing him, fury at Mikhail Romanov for not staying in the hunting lodge, fury at just about everyone.

  Vasilii Golitsyn had caught the brunt of that fury. There had been times that Sofia suspected that he was going to react with violence, but he hadn’t.

  Now Elena sniffed at him as she climbed into the carriage. It wasn’t a long ride. They could see the walls of the monastery from the docks. Sofia wondered as she climbed into the carriage, What is going to happen to me now?

  She looked at the monastery and next to it saw a wooden framework she recognized. It was a radio tower. Sofia remembered the chain of radio stations that stretched up to the Swedish territory in the Baltic had a link here. It was also a link in the chain of radio stations that went to the port of Archangelsk.

  Several hours later, Sofia was seated in a private room. This was a prison in all but name, but it was a prison for the daughters of great houses, not for peasants. And there was always the possibility that the political winds would change and this year’s prisoner would be next year’s boss, so you didn’t want them pissed at you.

  Sofia and Elena had been treated with respect. And gotten the latest news. Czar Mikhail was in Ufa and had sent a message to the king of Sweden. They got that from the radio station in Swedish territory. Aside from that, the news was still very confused. Sofia decided that the rest could wait. She was tired.

  Ufa

  July 1636

  The steamboats arrived late. Aside from a very small amount of gear on the Czarina Evdokia, Czar Mikhail’s party had been having to work with whatever the locals had on hand. Five years after Bernie had brought plans for the Fresno scraper to Russia, they hadn’t reached Ufa. There were no roads in Ufa. There were trails, gaps between buildings And aside from Filip Pavlovich Tupikov, Bernie, and a couple of others who had arrived by way of airship, there was no one who knew how to make a scraper or even how to use one. Worse, Ufa had proven to
have even less privacy than the dirigible. People had seen the Czarina Evdokia in the sky and headed for Ufa to see what was going on. Hunters and trappers, farmers and delegations, crowded every building in the town. And Bernie and Natasha were just too busy to go riding off in the country. Not that Natasha’s guards would allow her to go off alone, even if there was time. She might get et by a bar or somthin’, Bernie told Filip. And then had to explain the reference.

  “What took so long?” Bernie asked with frustration in his voice.

  “We had a breakdown. And besides, with your damn Dodge we were overloaded,” complained Maxim Andreevich. “It overstressed the engine.”

  “Oh, bull crap. Even I know more about steam than that. What broke?” For the next few minutes, as the two steamboats were tied up and the unloading began, Bernie and Maxim Andreevich argued companionably about steam engines and torque versus horsepower. Filip Pavlovich came down from the Ufa kremlin and started asking about equipment and personnel.

  “General Tim insisted that he and the troops could march,” Maxim Andreevich explained. “The techies at Bor had to have their hydrogen generators and their—” He stopped and waved his hands. “They wanted to bring the frigging curtains on their windows.”

  Bernie wasn’t as upset by that as the steamship captain. They needed that gear.

  Olga reached the docks in time to hear Bernie and Filip talking with this new man and tried to understand what she was seeing. There were bales and boxes, and iron and steel parts, copper tubes and even glass. It was a fortune in goods that simply could not be had here. Stanislav Ivanovich, her husband, was drinking less. He was still drinking, but it was more beer and less vodka, at least. And now there were all these new people with all this equipment and she didn’t know where she was going to put them or all these things.

  She looked over what was coming off the boats, and she started to notice something. She walked over to where the three men were still talking. “Did you bring anything useful?”

  The three men looked at her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Axes, saws, hammers, hand drills, looms, spindles, needles, pins? Platters, cups? Food?”

  She got blank looks. “Crazy people!” she shouted. Then she turned and stalked away. She had to find Anya, someone with some sense.

  Anya was in the tax warehouse, going over the records. On Czarina Evdokia’s instructions—and against her better judgment—Olga had explained her methods of recording the furs and their quality to Anya and Anya had been translating the records into writing for the last several days.

  “They didn’t bring anything useful.”

  “What? Who?” Then Olga saw realization on Anya’s face. “You mean on the steamboats?”

  Olga nodded.

  “It’s all useful, but you may have a point about immediate utility. What do you need?”

  “Everything. Axes, ham—”

  Anya held up her hands. “Wait a minute.” She turned to the table she had been working at, and gathered up a notebook, a pen, and a bottle of ink. “Come sit down and we will make a list.”

  Before Olga had gotten more than started Anya was asking, “Why do you need that? What’s this for?” and Olga found herself explaining, “We’re going to need food and housing for all these new people.”

  For the rest of the day Olga and Anya talked.

  “We’re going to have to send the riverboats after supplies,” Anya told Princess Natasha and Czarina Evdokia.

  “Is that safe?” asked the czarina.

  “I don’t know, but it’s necessary. I have been worrying about it since I started on the books here and talking with Olga clarified things for me. There’s not enough reserve, not nearly enough for the sort of influx of people we are expecting, much less hoping for. If we don’t get more food and basic equipment, we are going to freeze to death this winter…if we don’t starve first.

  “And we especially don’t have enough to rebuild Ufa as a modern city, the way the czar and Bernie want to.”

  On the road northwest of Moscow

  July 1636

  Elena Utkin was in need of some religious comfort, so she headed for Father Yulian’s wagon. Only to notice that it was rocking. Just a bit, in that certain way. Furious, she pulled open the door. Only to find Izabella astride the priest and in such a state of undress that the pregnancy was visible, if barely. She gasped. “Izabella!”

  “We’re busy, Mama. Wait your turn,” Izabella said.

  With a shout of rage, Elena reached for her daughter, pulled her away from Yulian, and shoved her to the floor, slapping her face as she fell. Then she turned toward Yulian and slapped him as well. “You rotten bastard!”

  “Now, Elena, you need to control yourself. This isn’t the way a mother should treat her daughter. You’re distraught. You need to calm down.” Yulian reached for her.

  Elena slapped him again. “Keep your hands off me, you faithless peasant! And keep them off my daughter too!”

  “You don’t control me!” Izabella hollered, her hand holding her face where her mother had slapped her. “And you’re the last one to be calling anyone faithless.”

  By now, the shouting had called the rest of the wagon train to the priest’s wagon and there was a crowd displaying a mixture of emotions. Quite a bit of amusement, because Father Yulian’s habits were more something not discussed than something not known. Especially in regard to his relationship with Elena and her daughter. There was even some jealousy showing on the part of some of the women. And there was a tiny bit of worry on Stefan’s part.

  Stefan was riding a borrowed horse, scouting the route through the lightly wooded plains to the north of Moscow. Once this had been forests, but now it was a mix of field, pasture, and woodland, much of it abandoned as the land wore out or the peasants to farm it became unavailable. Stefan didn’t know this; he just saw the results. Peasant villages left to weather, fields left unplowed, feral goats, pigs, even sheep. The land had been overfarmed, worn out, then abandoned, and then slowly recovered as nature took it back. There were forests and fields interspersed and abandoned paths, where a village’s produce had flowed to market before the village was abandoned. Stefan was on one of those. It was about six feet wide and twisty, but he thought they could run a wagon along it, if they were careful. Right up to here, where a four-inch-wide, twenty-foot-tall tree had decided that the middle of the road was the perfect place to grow. Stefan got down and examined the tree. It was going to have to be chopped down but that was the least of it. Once it was chopped down, it was going to have to be chopped up, because the limbs were interwoven with the limbs of trees on either side of the road.

  He remounted and rode around the tree and continued on. There might be more such blockages. As it happened, there weren’t, and he eventually turned his horse back the way he had come.

  “I need four men with axes to cut down a tree about three miles up the road, but after that it’s clear to a crossroads and an abandoned village about five miles further.”

  “That would be old Geonsk,” Yulian guessed.

  Stefan shrugged. “Maybe. But no one has lived there in a long time and probably no one will see us.” One good thing about the amount of forest they were passing through—unless someone was right on top of them, they were safe from observation. On the downside, things like the tree they were going to have to chop down to make the road passable and fresh wagon ruts meant that they would be easy to track.

  Balakhna, a town on the Volga

  Lieutenant Nikita Ivanovich Utkin sat at the table with the other lieutenants of his unit. He slapped down a broadsheet. “All the peasants in Russia are running mad.”

  “Not all of them,” corrected Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov judiciously, examining the broadsheet. “No more than a third, I would guess.”

  “You can laugh. You have that new farming equipment. You don’t need serfs.”

  “That’s not entirely true. My family doesn’t need as many serfs to farm a g
iven amount of land, but we still need serfs.”

  “So you don’t care if half your serfs run off? It’s just fewer mouths to feed.”

  “Not at all, my friend. I am just of a more philosophical bent. We’ll get them back, at least most of them. That’s what we’re here for, after all. To catch the runaways before they get to—” Alexander paused, then continued, leaving off “czar.” “—Mikhail.” It was a touchy subject, whether Mikhail was actually still the czar.

  “Maybe. But I’m worried about Ruzuka. Mother and Izabella are there all alone. And you know that the Poles and the Swedes are going to take advantage of this.”

  “Maybe not. They seem fully occupied with killing each other for the moment,” Pavel put in.

  “And since when has a magnate of Lithuania cared about the rest of the PLC? Ruzuka is only two hundred thirty miles from Smolensk,” Nikita said.

  “That’s a long way through Russian forests. Don’t get yourself in an uproar,” Pavel said.

  “And what about the runaways? You know they turn into Cossacks the moment they get out of sight of the village they are tied to. Bandits and murderers, that’s all a peasant is. Only restrained by the whip and the noose,” Nikita said.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Alexander repeated. He didn’t mind twitting Nikita Ivanovich, but he didn’t want to say anything that would get him or his family in trouble with the Sheremetev faction. Not since it had become clear that they were coming out on top in the power struggle that had happened after Czar Mikhail had sent his radio message. They were in enough trouble for being what Bernie Zeppi called “early adopters.” They had two family members actually at the Dacha and they had been there for the last three years.