CHAPTER 3
Zunghar Attack
Ufa docks
August 27, 1637
Ivan Maslov walked down the gangplank and saluted General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev. Ivan was a thin young man with hair and beard the color of a ripe carrot. He had piercing blue eyes that you normally didn’t notice because his face was dark with freckles.
“Welcome to Ufa, Ivan,” Tim said. “You won’t be staying long.”
“Why not?” Ivan asked, looking at his friend and noting Tim’s expression. Tim was black haired with olive skin and dark eyes. He’d recently grown a Vandyke-style beard that was as black as his hair. And right now his frown was worried.
Tim held out a radio telegraph message.
ZUNGHARS HAVE TAKEN ALMALIQ. STOP.
WILL SOON THREATEN ALMATY.
Ivan read it, then said, “What are we supposed to do about it? It’s going to take us months to get there and the Zunghars will have taken Almaty before an army could get there. And I’m talking about cavalry here, of which the Kazakhs have more and better than we do.”
“That’s what you and I are going to figure out. The maps are in the Kremlin.” He pointed.
✧ ✧ ✧
Fifteen minutes later, they were in the war room of the Ufa kremlin, examining a map of the state of Kazakh. Most of the work on the room was finished now. The walls were painted white, but the map table wasn’t set up yet. So they stood and drew with their fingers on the map hanging on the wall. It was built of information provided in the various atlases that had come back in time with the Ring of Fire, and information provided by scouts, explorers, and the Kazakhs.
It was detailed, but not all the details could be trusted. It showed Lake Balkhash, a huge body of water that snaked through the area between Kazakh and China. The Zunghars had their greatest strength in the area of the Tarbagatai Mountains east of Lake Balkhash.
“The Zunghars have invaded Kazakh lands south of the lake,” Tim said, pointing. “They’ve already sacked the city of Almaliq and we think they will soon be threatening the city of Almaty. At this point, we don’t know a lot more than that. Intelligence from Salqam-Jangir Khan’s troops are unreliable in terms of the strength of their forces, and the fact that the khan is close to a thousand miles away isn’t helping command and control. Or, for that matter, intel gathering.
“We need someone on the scene as soon as we can possibly get them there.”
“What about the Princess Anna?” Ivan asked.
“Down for repairs.” The Princess Anna was the smaller dirigible, built in a hidden valley out of spare parts. There had been two large dirigibles, but both had crashed. One right in Ufa, shot down by rocket fire. The other lost to bad weather in Germany. There was supposed to be a third under construction in Bor, but it was the better part of a year away from completion.
The Princess Anna was a boxy little thing. Little for a dirigible, that is. Even so, it dwarfed the Hero-class aircraft, but it didn’t have quite as much carrying capacity as they did. Aside from a couple of trips to the Baltic, it had mostly just shipped supplies to Hidden Valley. It was subject to serious hydrogen leaks and structural problems, but it did have a working radio with a big antenna. That and the height it could achieve made it a useful temporary link into the radio system anywhere in Russia. “We may use it to provide a radio link to the Aral Sea once it’s up again, but we certainly don’t want it anywhere near combat.”
“Are you sure? It’s huge and it’s in the sky. Whatever this wannabe Genghis Khan says, it’s still going to impress the hell out of the Zunghars.”
“I’ll talk to the czar about it,” Tim agreed.
New Ruzuka Foundry, Ufa
August 28, 1637
Vasilii came into the New Ruzuka Foundry carrying a satchel full of contracts. He saw Izabella talking with Stefan. They were five feet from an induction furnace where a worker was heating a rod of iron to white hot.
Vasilii went up to Izabella. “Hello, Izabella. I have—”
“Stop right there, Vasilii Lyapunov.” Izabella held up her hand. “That had better not be another contract.”
Then there was a bang as the drop forge slammed into the white-hot rod and turned it into an iron trough.
Vasilii stopped. This wasn’t the response he was expecting. “What’s going on? Do you object to making money now?”
“We’re having to move.” Izabella waved around at the shop floor. “And besides, we have the clip contracts. We have contracts for revolvers. We have the steam turbines for your airplane, and we can’t find another skilled machinist for love or money. Just how do you expect us to fulfill another top-priority government contract?”
Vasilii wasn’t sure what to do. The engine was just outside in a large wooden crate on a wagon. It was one of the four aircraft engines that they’d managed to smuggle in from Amsterdam, and he wanted Stefan to take the thing apart and reproduce all the metal parts, because they were going to need internal combustion engines for the smaller aircraft. Because the smaller the aircraft, the less wiggle room there was to stick in extra bits like a boiler and a condenser.
Vasilii looked at Stefan pleadingly. Stefan sighed and said, “Okay. Come into the office.”
✧ ✧ ✧
They went into the office and Izabella went to her desk and sat in her padded swivel chair. Stefan went to the stool next to the drafting table and waved for Vasilii to explain.
Vasilii told him what he wanted.
Stefan and Izabella said it was going to take a while. The iron mines in Muscovite Russia were producing a lot and the ones in the Ural Mountains were starting to produce as well. But they had to smuggle in the Muscovite iron and the Ural iron was just starting up. Also, the copper mines, which were mostly in the Urals, were producing well. That part was fine, but converting that ore into copper and steel was taking time, and even more time was being taken up by machining that steel into parts.
There was a shortage of labor from Poland to Tobolsk, and from the Arctic to the Black Sea. It was worse in Muscovite Russia than in the Sovereign States, but it was bad enough in the Sovereign States. A skilled machinist could write his own ticket. Stefan, by now, had twenty of the expensive fellows and each and every one of them was building himself a house in Ufa, and they were going to own those houses. Inflation was creeping in, but only creeping because those skilled machinists with the machines that Stefan had were putting out twelve to twenty times as much as a blacksmith would.
And it wasn’t just the New Ruzuka Foundry. There were several foundries in Ufa, but they were all working at, or more often beyond, capacity. In Vasilii’s opinion, Stefan’s foundry was the best, or at least the most innovative. Not only was Stefan creative in the way he looked at things, he’d gathered other creative people around him. That was why Vasilii had brought him a project that in some ways more properly belonged to the Dacha. Because if the various plants in Ufa were overworked, the Dacha was even worse.
Still, by begging and pleading, he got them to take on the job.
Ufa Dacha
August 28, 1637
Vadim Ivanovich would never fly again, but that didn’t stop him from being a hardworking man who wanted to make sure that those who flew would have the best equipment. He made notes then adjusted a magnet in a small sheath of copper coil, then read the output on a voltmeter and made another note.
The aqualator computer blocks were developed in Grantville after the Ring of Fire. They had hard limits on their utility and they were much heavier than the integrated circuits that they used up-time, but they could be made with down-time tools and they would work for basic digital processing of signals. The trick was converting the aqualator’s mechanical output into electrical signals.
And the Hero-class airplanes were going to need aqualators to help run their systems. They would need to take the input from the steam gauges and make them into readable numbers and at least semiautomatic responses. Also to make sure that the radio on the plane worked, that the batteries were charged but not overcharged, and a hundred other tasks.
There was, by now, a standardized machine code for the aqualators, and Vadim was building the connectors that would tie the Ufa-made aqualators into the electrical system of the Hero-class airplanes. The planes wouldn’t have computer screens or a keyboard. Instead, they would have a set of switches and numeric readouts with electromagnetic actuators controlled by the aqualator’s output.
Vadim moved another actuator and marked down another reading. The Heroes wouldn’t be fly-by-wire aircraft, but they would have automated systems to make flying easier and safer. This was a retrofit into an already built system, which made some things easier and others harder, but generally limited their options, which was speeding things up because they weren’t going back and forth between fifty answers for each question. Vadim snorted to himself. Just four or five answers.
Ufa docks
August 28, 1637
The Ilya Muromets was made in Murom and named after that city’s most famous hero. It was sixty feet long and twenty wide, with a steam engine and four cannon, two on the port side and two on the starboard. And Ivan Nikitich Romanov was going to be really pissed when he found out that his brand-new purpose-built steamship had dumped the captain and the dog boys over the side as soon as they passed Nizhny Novgorod on their way to the front.
Bernie Zeppi looked over at the former chief engineer—and now captain—of the Ilya Muromets and said, “Sorry, Captain, but we’re going to have to change the name. After much debate, mostly between the two eldest of Czar Mikhail’s children, the new class of large aircraft are going to be called Bogatyr or Polianitsa, which I translate into hero and heroine. Which means that one of them is going to end up named Ilya Muromets.”
“That seems most unfair, Okolnichy Zeppi,” the captain complained, but he was smiling when he said it. “After all, we named ours first and, besides, it was built in Murom, the original Ilya Muromets’ hometown.” Then he sighed. “I’m more concerned about what you’re calling me. I’m not a captain. I’m an engineer.”
In fact, Gennady Bobrov was of streltzi rank and had worked at the Dacha from 1632 to 1634, then been sent to the Gorchakov family property in Murom to build steam systems for steamboats. He’d been there when Bernie and Natasha used Murom as the base for rescuing Czar Mikhail from the hunting lodge where he was being held.
At the time, Gennady had been unwilling to risk his new family on a fool’s errand that had no chance of working and every chance of getting him and his new wife and child killed.
It wasn’t until months later that he realized he’d backed the wrong horse. Then it took more months to smuggle his wife and daughter out of Murom, during which time he’d been tapped as the engineer for this war boat. Aside from the four breech-loading cannon, it had black-powder rockets and heavy oak armor above the waterline.
“I feel the same way,” Bernie assured him. “Okolnichy isn’t a rank that I ever aspired to.”
“I’m serious, sir,” Gennady said. “I’m a good steam guy and I know this ship’s systems but, frankly, I would prefer to be in a factory in Kazan or Ufa, building steam engines to power riverboats. I know how to do that. I very much don’t know how to command a ship in battle.”
Bernie looked at the man and nodded. “Very well, Gennady. I’ll speak to Czar Mikhail about it, and we’ll see what we can do.”
✧ ✧ ✧
It was fifteen minutes later when Czar Mikhail’s secretary waved Bernie into the czar’s office. Czar Mikhail was doing paperwork and a servant was at the teapot. Czar Mikhail looked up as Bernie came in. “So is Gennady the new captain?”
“Gennady doesn’t want it, Mikhail,” Bernie said as Mikhail waved him to the couch. “He got his wife to Kazan, and they’re happy there. Happy enough, anyway. He didn’t want to come here in the first place. He can’t go back to Murom, so when he was told to bring it the rest of the way here, he did so. But he has no desire to live on a steamboat with his wife and family back home in Kazan.”
“It seems a perfectly reasonable attitude,” Mikhail agreed. “And it’s convenient anyway. I have a number of deti boyars who would love such a post, in command of a powerful military unit and still sleeping in a bed every night and having hot meals prepared.”
“Just don’t give me any fire eaters, please. This is supposed to be a diplomatic mission. We want to show our teeth, not go around biting people to prove we can.” Bernie accepted a cup of Turkish coffee that had arrived by way of the Caspian Sea and the Volga River system. “How are the other balls you’re juggling doing? What’s going on with Tim and Ivan?”
“I just got another radio telegram from Salqam-Jangir Khan,” Czar Mikhail said. “Asking me to expedite.”
“Hmm,” Bernie said. “Ivan Maslov is bright enough, but he’s really not a steam guy. I don’t think he’ll be that much direct help in putting together the expedition. How about if we send him to Salqam-Jangir Khan on the Scout?”
The body of the first of the Razvedchik, or Scout planes, was finished. Its airframe had been finished for months, waiting on the engines to arrive. It had one 110 hp engine and a chain drive that went from the engine to an ACLG system. It was a pusher design that Vladimir had bought from the M&S aircraft design firm.
“And you want to risk him in a brand-new plane with a brand-new pilot?” Mikhail asked.
“Well, we’re not sending him Tim, so having Ivan show up in an airplane strikes me as a good idea.”
“Certainly. I’m just not sure how good an idea it will be to have Ivan Maslov die in a plane crash on the way there.”
“That’s a good point.” While by now the Sovereign States had a good number of dirigible pilots, it didn’t have any airplane pilots except Vladimir and Brandy Bates Gorchakov.
And while Vladimir had more experience on the larger multiengine planes, Brandy had some experience on small planes. Not a lot, but in this very unsafe world, enough.
“Okay. As soon as they get the wingtip fixed on the Nastas’ya Nikulichna, we’ll send him to Shavgar.
“Let me have a talk with Ivan Borisovich Petrov,” Mikhail said, and Bernie lifted an eyebrow. Ivan Borisovich Petrov was the son of Boris Petrov, who had been in Grantville with Vladimir when he’d recruited Bernie back in 1631. Boris was now the Grantville desk in the Embassy Bureau in Muscovite Russia, while Ivan Borisovich was the Grantville desk for the Embassy Bureau in the Sovereign States.
“I know he’s young and I know he’s in the Grantville desk in the Embassy Bureau, but he’s sharp and he’s trustworthy.”
Bernie nodded. The lofted eyebrow wasn’t about Ivan Borisovich’s competence. It was the political consequences of going around the head of the Embassy Bureau. The Russian legally enforced nepotism was still there in the United Sovereign States, and it sometimes forced Mikhail to install people he didn’t fully trust in positions of authority in the Embassy Bureau. Simeon Budanov was thirty-five and might well be working undercover for the Muscovite government. Or he might just be an incompetent. In either case, he was jealous of his prerogatives and didn’t like Ivan Borisovich’s access to the czar one bit.
“Why don’t you let me talk with Ivan Borisovich?” Bernie asked. “That won’t be quite as blatantly going around Budanov.”
“I don’t care about . . . ” Mikhail stopped, and waved Bernie to go ahead. The issue wasn’t what Budanov would do to Mikhail. It was what he would do to Ivan Borisovich.
✧ ✧ ✧
Bernie invited Ivan Borisovich Petrov to dinner, and he and Natasha discussed who to see. Who to see turned out to be the new head of the China desk at the Embassy Bureau, Kirill Blinov. Bernie knew Kirill. He was half Chinese, half Russian, and had been doing the real work of the China desk even before he got the job.
“I know Kirill a little. You think we can trust him?”
“As much as anyone in the Embassy Bureau,” Ivan Borisovich said with a grimace. “But yes. He’s making a bit on the side, but in his case that makes him more trustworthy, not less.”
“Get him aside and have him find us some native guides who aren’t afraid of the notion of flying in an airplane.”
Ufa river docks
August 30, 1637
Brandy Bates Gorchakov strapped Yury Arsenyev into the front seat of the still-unnamed Scout plane. The plane was sitting on the bank of the Ufa River, just upstream of where the Ufa River merged into the Belaya River. The wooden pier stuck out about twenty feet into the Ufa. It was a warm, clear day. The cockpit of the plane was a bit cramped with the two of them.
Arsenyev was a Cossack trapper and they were about to learn if he could hack flying. She got him belted in, then climbed into the back seat. She set her switches, and the ground crew chiefs pulled the prop to start the engine. It started right up.
She engaged the fan and as the air was forced into the air cushion, the plane began to move. It slid out over the water and gained speed rapidly. She pulled back on the stick, and up they went. As soon as they were off the water, she cut power to the fan for the ACLG and pulled the lever that tightened the straps and pulled the skirt up tight against the flat bottom. The engine was only a hundred and ten horsepower, but the plane was very light for its wing surface, so they gained height rapidly.
Once they had a thousand feet, she winged over into a tight turn, the sort of maneuver that moved the direction of gravity away from down, or at least moved down over to the side a bit. That, combined with the open cockpit in the observer’s seat was enough to turn anyone with a fear of flying into a gibbering wreck.
Yury Arsenyev was yelling all right, but it was in excited joy. Brandy was convinced, but she stayed up for a quarter hour to give him his money’s worth. Then she brought the Scout around for a landing on the Ufa River and skimmed up onto the shore, cutting power to the engine.
Ariq Ogedei wasn’t as thrilled by the flight, but he wasn’t overly bothered, either. A Khoshut, one of the four main tribes of the Oirat Confederation, Ariq had been a refugee since his clan lost one of the more or less constant clan feuds. He was Yury’s brother-in-law and partner for years. The sister that connected them had died in childbirth a few years back. They made their living as trappers, but supplemented it by providing the Embassy Bureau with mapping and intelligence information.
They would be acting as guides on the trip to Shavgar, and also as political advisors. Since they were both able to handle flying, the project could move forward.
Residence of Bernie and Natasha
August 30, 1637
The town house that Bernie and Natasha lived in was right next door to the Ufa Dacha, and not far from the Kremlin. It was relatively small, but exceedingly modern, with electric lights and indoor plumbing. While they now had tubes and were working very hard at making them themselves, they didn’t have enough or the right type for microwaves, so the kitchen used an oil stove that used oil shipped up from the Caspian Sea. That, and the lack of other modern conveniences meant that Bernie and Natasha needed servants.
That wasn’t a problem for Natasha. She’d grown up in a house full of servants, and many of the servants she had now were people she’d known since early childhood.
Bernie was less comfortable, partly because he was generally less at ease with servants, but partly because a fair percentage of the servants didn’t approve of Bernie being married to Natasha. Up-timer or not, he wasn’t a prince, and “their” Natasha deserved a prince. So most of them saw him as an interloper. But they had since he’d arrived, so Bernie was used to it by now and they were used to him. In fact, their resentment had mellowed somewhat.
Mags, one of those servants, placed Bernie’s eggs before him with the barest of disapproving sniffs, and then went for coffee. Coffee was more available than orange juice in Ufa. It came up from the Ottoman Empire via the Black Sea, up the Don River, over a short stretch of land to the Volga, and up to Ufa, making the inclusion of the Don Cossacks in the Sovereign States important to its economic welfare. The Turks had oranges too, but oranges were perishable, and the trip from the North African orange groves to Ufa was long and mostly slow. By now there were steamships on the Don River as well as the Volga, because they’d been bought by riverboat owners who worked the Don River. Mostly they were Russian built, but some of them were Ottoman built. Technology was spreading, and by now it wasn’t spreading from just one place. The old Dacha near Moscow, the new Dacha in Ufa, and several Ottoman cities on the Black Sea had become centers from which the technology spread.
Coffee arrived, and with it fresh-baked rolls with butter. The butter was from Kazakh cows herded up from the state of Kazakh to Ufa in a cattle drive. There was a complex of slaughterhouses just downriver from Ufa now, complete with steam-powered ice houses to load refrigerated beef and mutton onto refrigerated steamboats to take that meat from Ufa to the Caspian Sea and to Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, and Solikamsk.
People were getting rich. And among those people were Bernie and Natasha. They owned over a dozen steamboats now, as well as interests in over a hundred businesses here in Ufa and in Kazan. That didn’t include the wealth that by Sovereign States law was theirs, which was at the moment divided up among the boyars of Muscovite Russia.
The issue was getting that money from here to Grantville, where Ron Stone and several members of the Barbie Consortium were holding what was now approaching a hundred million dollars of United Sovereign States of Russia debt. That, with the deflation that the USE dollar had experienced over the last five years, was in dollars that were closer to 1960 dollars than 2000 dollars.
In any case, it was a lot of money. And they needed some way of getting that money to Grantville. Bernie thought he might just have a way of doing it.
But that way was dependent on the Don Cossacks biting the bullet and joining the Sovereign States. He wanted to smuggle money and some gold through the Black Sea to the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and into the Med, where it would travel to Venice and take a plane to Grantville. It was risky, and to make it happen they needed to open a regular smuggler route with Sovereign States–owned ships that could make the trip with as few cargo transfers as possible.
Which led right back to the Don Cossacks joining the Sovereign States, and owning the Don River right down to Taganrog Bay.
It was about then that Natasha came in, gave him a kiss, and joined him for the last little bit of breakfast.
“We need a rail line between the Volga and the Don. Probably between Tsaritsyn and Kalach,” he greeted her with a hug and a smile.
“Yes, dear, I know,” Natasha said. “The Don Cossacks have been demanding such a rail line since the beginning of the convention. The wagoneers of Tsaritsyn have been insisting that it will destroy their business for as long as the idea has been around. And it’s a syndicate of the wagoneers of Tsaritsyn that controls the government of Tsaritsyn, which is why Tsaritsyn is refusing to join the Sovereign States until the Sovereign States government promises that no such rail line, no canal, no nothing, will be put in place. Besides, what we actually need is a canal, not a rail line—and a big canal. Big enough for ships on the Caspian to transfer to the Sea of Azov.”
“Yes, but that’s a project that’s going to take at least a decade. In the meantime, we need a sixty-five-mile railroad to move goods from the Volga system to the Don system and back.”
“Which brings us back to the politics, and why Mikhail is getting ready to send us down the Volga in gunboats to make sure the oligarchs of Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan realize that Czar Mikhail’s patience isn’t unlimited. Eat your sausage.”
“Yes, dear.”