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CHAPTER 23

Snow and Ice


Landing 1,258 miles east-southeast of Tobolsk

December 15, 1637

The day dawned clear and bright. That was the good news. The bad news was that the day was covered in snow. And so was the plane. The inside of the plane smelled of unwashed bodies. Also, they were running low on wood, and that meant that they were going to have to spend at least another day chopping wood into chunks small enough to fit into the firebox.

They got to it. Vlad, Yury, and Ariq put on snowshoes and went out to gather wood and if they were lucky, hunt. Women’s lib was fine, but Brandy decided to let the guys do this. She stayed in the plane with Yulia.

Once the first load of wood was brought in, they collected up snow and melted it into water to refill the water tanks and then more water to melt the snow and ice that covered the wings and the skirt. Brandy was right. It took a day and more to get a load of rather damp wood. The dampness made the wood heavier and meant that part of the heat of the fire was used in drying the wood before it caught. The exhaust from the firebox was blown by a small fan into the spreading chamber of the ACLG. In flight, it was pushed out the back of the spreading chamber, so the evaporated water and smoke meant that the Nicky left a trail of smoke and condensing steam as it flew, a line across the sky from where it had been to where it was going.

Right now it meant that the chimney was below the house, and if the wind was wrong—which it was at the moment—smoke surrounded the plane and flew in their faces.

Brandy inflated the ACLG and using the props rotated the plane until it faced into the wind. That was the advantage of the Hero-class aircraft. Once the boiler was working, steam could be set to a variety of functions, charging the batteries, inflating the ACLG, running the engines, even cooking.

✧ ✧ ✧

For another day they collected wood and hunted, getting a couple of rabbits, but Brandy was starting to get a bit worried. They were spending a lot of time collecting wood and people had to eat. So their food, mostly freeze-dried, was being used up rather more quickly than they had expected.

“Vlad, let’s keep low when we can.”

“Why?”

“I want to look for game.”

“I am not going out on the wing and trying to sharp-shoot a deer.” Vladimir grinned at her.

“I’ll give it a try,” Ariq offered.

“No one is going to shoot from the wing while we’re in flight!” Brandy said. “But if we spot a herd of something from eight hundred feet, we can land and go shoot a deer, or whatever we find.”

They were, if their readings were right, two hundred and fifty-eight miles east-southeast of Tobolsk and near the Irtysh River, which was starting to turn south on its way to China. While it wasn’t the most direct route to the east, after some thought they decided to follow it south. It was a natural highway from the eastern edge of Kazak to Tobolsk, so if locks could be placed on the river, it might provide a trade route. They flew for two hours at a height of between eight hundred and a thousand feet, keeping the river in sight.

By now they were out of range of any radios, so radio location was out. They had their inertial compass and the magnetic compass, and they took regular sightings to determine their ground speed. But errors were going to creep in. As it was, Brandy figured that they were from one to ten miles away from their estimated location.

They were getting a little low on wood before they spotted a group of Altai wapiti. Keeping well away, they landed and everyone but Yulia went hunting.


Landing 2,480 miles southeast of Tobolsk

December 16, 1637

Brandy wasn’t great on skis, but they were better than snowshoes, so she made her way along with Vlad, Ariq, and Yuri to stalk the herd. They found a small group of bachelors, nibbling on the bark and leaves from a grove of trees. Brandy took off her skis, uncased her AK and, shuddering, got down into a prone position in the snow two hundred yards from the group of small animals. She adjusted her scope and found one of the young bucks. She took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. The Altai wapiti jumped and started to run, but it didn’t get far. The bullet had hit it in the chest, and if it hadn’t hit the heart, it had punctured both lungs.

Brandy and the men went to collect the buck and the other bachelors left the area.

It was while they were butchering that the guests arrived.

✧ ✧ ✧

Gan had seen the flying thing because of the trail it left in the sky. It was moving fast but he set his men to following it. He was the leader of his clan, who were partly herders, but mostly hunters. He had a steel helmet and a steel breastplate, but that wasn’t why they called him Gan. Gan was his people’s name for steel, and he had the name because he was hard as steel.

The hunting party heard the bang and slowed, then a couple of Altai wapiti bucks appeared around a clump of trees. Trotting nervously, almost as though they were being herded to Gan and the hunting party.

Khasar, who was a very good archer, drew his bow and fired. It was a snap shot from almost thirty yards, so the arrow caught the buck in the rump. It would slow it, but probably not kill it.

“Curse you, Khasar,” Gan said. “You should have waited. Take Enkh and track that buck. The rest of you, come with me.”

They rode around the clump of trees to see a group of hunters on skis. They were strangely, if warmly, dressed. And Gan, who had never seen a Chinese gun but had heard of them, guessed that the long stick that the . . .  That was a woman! . . . that the woman was holding, was a gun, and the men who were even now butchering the animal had similar guns strapped to their backs.

Gan was considered hard among his people because he had an iron sense of right and wrong. These people hadn’t hurt him or his. They’d stopped to hunt, but that was no great crime, and their hunt had led him to game. So, so far as Gan was concerned, that was even. Gan wasn’t a thief and he wasn’t a fool. It was a safe bet that these people had come from the flying thing, and if they had, he didn’t want a fight with people who could fly, even if just now it looked like he had the upper hand.

He rode forward with his men following. Examining the track of the skis, he followed them back, and back, and back some more, to where, from the tracks, the woman had stopped to shoot. He looked at the strange weapon in her arms and was no longer sure if his people had the upper hand.

By now, the strangers were all looking at him. He pulled up and said, “You are on our lands.”

At first it looked like no one understood him.

Then one spoke. “We are just passing through and stopped to hunt and gather firewood.” The speaker had a truly horrible accent. “I am Ariq, and this is our leader, Prince Vladimir Gorchakov.”

“That’s a lot of name,” Gan said, guessing that most of it was titles intended to impress. But Gan wasn’t impressed. Not by the name. The weapons and the flying thing, those impressed him. “Where are you from?”

“The United Sovereign States of Russia,” said Ariq.

Again with the long names, but he recognized Russia. The Cossacks that demanded tribute sometimes said they were from Russia. “We don’t pay tribute to your chief. This is part of the Kazakh Khanate.”

“Excellent. Salqam-Jangir Khan joined the Kazakh Khanate with the Sovereign States. We are countrymen. But don’t worry. We aren’t here for tribute.”

That wasn’t good news, in spite of the last bit. While his clan’s lands were technically in the Kazakh Khanate, they were on the northeastern edge and extended out of the Khanate. For the most part, they simply ignored the Kazakhs and were ignored by them.

The strangers talked among themselves, and then Ariq spoke again. “Vladimir wonders if you would like part of the buck since we took it on your lands, and also wonders if you would like to come with us back to our”—he said a strange word, then continued—“flying canoe.”

“Yes, I saw your flying thing and the trail of cloud that it left behind. I would like to see it.”

They finished butchering the elk and packed it on their horse then went to the “flying canoe.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Vladimir was nervous about the encounter. There were ten men in the hunting party, all armed with bows and arrows compared to his four. Three of them had breast plates, none of which would stop a bullet, but bullets or not, those odds sucked. Especially out in the open. The local leader of the hunting party was called Gan, which meant steel or iron. At least according to Ariq, who was the only one who spoke these people’s language. It wasn’t Kazakh, which Vladimir could speak, though it was a related language.

When they got back to the plane, Vlad invited Gan into the plane, but asked that the rest of the hunting party wait outside since it was crowded inside. And it was, with all the firewood containers. But he did bring Gan in and showed him their maps.

Gan knew about Tobolsk, but had never been there. He knew of Shavgar and Almaliq but had never been to either. His people lived in and hunted in a range of a few hundred miles, and there were no cities, just moving camps, with herds of horses and cattle. They moved their horses and cattle from summer to winter grazing and back again, very much like the more rural Kazakh clans.

They spent two days with Gan and his tribe, traded most of the elk they’d killed for dried meat and dried cheese, then flew on, still mostly following the Irtysh River.


Landing 3,670 miles southeast of Tobolsk

December 17, 1637

They took off from Landing Two, carrying mostly charcoal. By now they’d learned that the kind of wood they burned and the condition of the wood affected the range. With charcoal, the Hero had a range of better than two hundred fifty miles, with a tail wind as much as three hundred. Fuel oil gave a range of better than three hundred fifty miles.

It didn’t matter in this case. They found a lake near the river that had an island on it. It was only three miles south of the Irtysh River, and at the moment it was covered in ice. But it would make an excellent refueling station. They landed and spent some time mapping and taking sightings. The stop was without incident.

“I’ve been thinking about this since we left Tobolsk,” Brandy said that evening. “We need to go on south until we connect up with the Kazakh air route.”

“Why?” Vlad asked. “I’m not disagreeing, I just want to know your reasoning.”

“Honestly, it’s a little vague. Things have been going well and we have gathered a lot of data. I want that data in the hands of the Ufa nerd brigade. And I want to have an actual fuel dump here on the island. Once we get to Almaliq, we can send all the maps back to Ufa, and while we’re going on east, they can set up fuel depots back the way we came.”

“When we left Tobolsk, Almaliq was still in enemy hands.”

“Even so, it’s under siege.” Brandy waved that away. “It doesn’t matter whether we’ve captured it or not. The train will be there and they will have oil.”

“Probably,” Vladimir agreed.

They gathered more wood and flew south the next morning.


Almaliq

January 1, 1638

The plane was out of wood, but not yet of steam, when Vlad brought it down next to the steam train outside of Almaliq.

Vlad climbed out of the plane and immediately saw Togym. The Kazakh sultan was wearing a Sovereign States uniform, complete with the baseball cap with scrambled eggs on the brim and a star on the pate.

“General,” Vlad asked more than said.

“Yes, and once this mess is done”—Togym hooked a thumb at the city of Almaliq about half a mile away—“I’m going to be a senator from Kazakh.”

“Well, congratulations,” Vladimir said. “Where’s Ivan?”

“Recalled to Ufa. That’s why I got the promotion.”

“Not the only reason, I’m sure,” Brandy said.

“I like to think that the khan has some confidence in me,” Togym acknowledged. “But what are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story involving maps, wood, and a need for fuel oil.”

“We’re starting to get a little low on fuel oil,” Togym said. “The air support has been using it at a phenomenal rate and the steamboats don’t bring it much farther than Shavgar. We’ve been the fuel depot on this end of the airlift. But let’s go inside out of the weather while we talk.”

In the command car of the war train, they sat down to an excellent meal prepared by Togym’s personal chef, and talked about their adventures. They showed Togym the maps and, using the radio links, sent a report to the capital. Since it was going to be going through twenty intermediary radio stations to get to Ufa, they would get the news sometime tomorrow.

“We’re using up the tubes too fast,” Togym complained. The down-time-made tubes did have vacuums, but those vacuums weren’t as consistently good as the mass-produced tubes they had had up-time, which meant they wore out faster. And they needed a lot of them as the radio telegraph system expanded.

“I know. All we can do is the best we can do,” Brandy said. “So, tell us what’s been going on?”

Togym told them about Ivan being called back to Ufa, the rumor that Tim had some magical way of taking Birkingrad, that they’d gone to Perm for some reason, that Bernie was shuttling back and forth setting up air stations to the east, and about the Derbet, who had forted up Almaliq, and were prepared for a siege.

“You know we might be able to help with that,” Vladimir said cautiously. “Are they talking to you at all?”

“Yes,” Togym said, “promising to kill us all if we attack them and insisting that we can’t run the Silk Road without them.”

That wasn’t true, but there were large groves of apple trees surrounding the town. This could be a really valuable agricultural center, and apparently had been until fairly recently. The Derbet, one of the tribes that had made up the Zunghars, hadn’t trashed the surrounding groves of apple trees. They, or at least the Zunghars, had looted the town, which probably had a population of six or seven thousand. They’d killed almost all the men and taken the women. These weren’t nice people by up-timer standards and honestly Vladimir’s first impulse was to kill them off to the last man.

But Vladimir was a diplomat. That was why he’d been sent to Grantville in the first place. And that job required a level of cold-blooded pragmatism that sometimes left Vladimir disgusted with himself. This was one of those times. He spent the next three days convincing the murdering bastards to switch sides and join the state of Kazakh and thereby the Sovereign States.

By that time they had at least a basic idea of what was going on north of Ufa.


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