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CHAPTER 28

Consequences


Ufa

February 27, 1638

The fireworks started before the sun had fully set. Czar Mikhail sat bundled up on a veranda located on the third floor of the still under construction royal palace and watched the fireworks with his wife and children. Filip Pavlovich Tupikov—who Czar Mikhail now knew wrote the Flying Squirrel pamphlets—his wife, Anya and a few others were also there. There was a starburst and the children oohed.

Mikhail looked over at his wife and said, “I think I am going to keep the capitol here in Ufa.” His tone invited her opinion.

“We haven’t won the war yet,” Evdokia cautioned.

“Uncle Ivan isn’t an idiot. He is quite capable of reading a map. The Muscovy River to the Oka, the Oka to the Volga at Nizhny Novgorod. We own Nizhny Novgorod. As soon as the ice melts, we’ll own the Volga all the way to Rzhev. For that matter, we’re going to own the Oka probably all the way to the Muscovy River. That means we own most of the Muscovy tax base, and most of the lands. And I’ll tell you something else, my dear. Neither Bor nor Nizhny Novgorod switched sides willingly, so they and the territory they control will come into the Sovereign States as free states, whatever the owners of that property might want. And that will let the boyars and the deti boyars that follow them know that there is a cost to continuing to hold out against us.”

It was a cold-blooded calculation, and every adult on the veranda knew it. Not an explicit promise to let the boyars of western Russia keep their serfs and slaves if they switched sides willingly, but an implicit promise to leave the serfs chained to the land in order to end the war.

Filip Pavlovich Tupikov looked at the czar of all the Russias and said, “Your Majesty, I suspect that the Flying Squirrel is somewhere in the trees, listening to us speak.”

“I’m sure of it, Filip,” Czar Mikhail said.

“I don’t think you’re going to like the pamphlet he’s likely to write. He will approve of making the states of Nizhny Novgorod and Bor to be free states. But the promise to leave Muscovite Russian serfdom in place? He’s not going to like that one little bit.”

“I don’t like it either, Filip, but unlike that winged rat, I have a country to rule, and that means I have to make compromises sometimes.” He shrugged. “Still, I doubt I’ll assign Miroslava Holmes to ferret out the squirrel over this.”

“She wouldn’t anyway,” Anya said. “She’s quite fond of the squirrel, you know.”

“As for me,” Evdokia said. “I’ll believe it when I see your Uncle Ivan bowing to you in the palace right here in Ufa.”

✧ ✧ ✧

It took rather longer for the news to get to the USE. Radios took it to the Don River and with Nizhny Novgorod again in friendly hands, one of the Heroes from Novgorod took the news the rest of the way by the southern route.


Grantville

March 3, 1638

Hans Josephson looked up as the computer beeped, afraid he was going to have to call in an up-timer to reboot the thing again.

The control tower at Grantville was by 1638 a modern place. It had its own tube radio complete with a computer. It was, however, an old computer. A Compaq Presario and it had occasional glitches. It did frequency-scanning across the approved aircraft radio frequency range. Also by 1638, the eight-bit-byte from up-time was standard. So were the basic handshake codes that computers use to talk to each other over the phone or radio. In other words, the Grantville control tower could recognize a “squawk,” not that it got many. Most airplanes didn’t have radios and the ones that did couldn’t afford the weight or the price of an aqualator, much less an actual up-time computer.

So Hans’ first thought was that Betsy was being fussy again and something had gone wrong. Not so. On the screen was a squawk notice.

Aircraft type: Hero

Aircraft number: 3

Aircraft Name: Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova

Aircraft location:

N 50 33 37

E 12 07 33

Direction: 289 Magnetic

Indicated airspeed: 103 mph

Right. Hans Josephson had been notified when they’d taken off from Prague a bit over an hour ago. They must have caught a tail wind. He tapped a key and the computer showed today’s weather. There was indeed a high just east of Prague and moving west.

And now he remembered the Hero that Princess Natasha of the Sovereign States had arrived in, with her up-timer consort Bernie Zeppi. The Hero had aqualators like the Jupiters. They could and did “squawk,” sending out digital signatures, including the name of the aircraft, the country of origin, the owner and the last input location. There were no satellites, so the locations were estimates punched in by the pilots.

The aqualators hadn’t taken the role of a personal computer. One, they were too weak in terms of processing power, and two, they were much more difficult to program. Instead, they’d taken on more specialized roles. They could be “hardwired” with the liquid equivalent of ROM read-only memory, and as long as the individual aqualator was used for only a few standardized functions, they worked just fine.

Wanting to know how far out they actually were, Hans Josephson got on the radio.

✧ ✧ ✧

Captain Irina Novikov had her headphones on as they approached Grantville Airport. Her flight engineer was busy with the fuel consumption readings and a slow steam leak that appeared to be in engine four, which was the left-side outboard engine.

So she heard, “Grantville ground control to Hero 3. Give your position and heading, over.”

“This is the Tina,” Irina said. “Heading 288 magnetic. Give us a minute on the position. I don’t have landmarks. Will try a radio fix.”

She turned to her copilot slash navigator, Gregory Petrov. “Get us a read from a couple of the repeater stations and plug them into Baby.” Baby was the aqualator and it already had the locations of all the repeaters between Prague and Grantville. She’d picked them up in Prague. It took Gregory and Baby about forty-five seconds to get the two directions. They were approximate. The equipment worked, but wasn’t as precise as Irina would have preferred.

Gregory Petrov plugged them into the computer and Baby updated their position. Gregory pushed a button and the Tina squawked her position again.

“Thanks, Tina,” ground control said. “Did your General Tim really take Nizhny Novgorod in three days?”

“Well, it took his army eleven days to march there, but after that, da. Three days.” She was speaking Amideutsch. It was the international language of aviation, because just about every text on how to fly or build an airplane was in up-timer American. And once they’d hit the radio network that centered on Grantville and Magdeburg the news had raced ahead of them.

The air traffic controller kept her occupied with stories of Nizhny Novgorod’s conquest until they landed.

✧ ✧ ✧

Prince Petr Ivanovich Odoevskii’s father was, right now, sitting in the Boyar Duma in Moscow. His grandfather had been the exchequer when Filaret was running things from behind Mikhail’s throne. He was about as noble as it got, barring being the czar. At least as Russians counted such things. His father had instructed him to defect to Czar Mikhail in 1636, and he’d been placed in the Embassy Bureau and on February 27, two hours after the news that Nizhny Novgorod had fallen, he’d been assigned as the new ambassador to the USE.

From Petr’s point of view, it had been horrible timing. Petr had a girlfriend and she would be staying in Ufa. Still, duty was duty. And he was a Russian noble. What made it worse was he had a handler. Czar Mikhail had informed him that should he feel it necessary, Lavrenty Belikov could relieve him of duty. Lavrenty Belikov was one of those old Embassy Bureau types, the sort of bureaucrat that knew where all the bodies were buried, mostly because he’d buried them himself. He, like Prince Petr Ivanovich, was in the Embassy Bureau. And, like Petr, had been sent to the plane with very little notice on the twenty-seventh.

“What do you think?” Prince Petr Ivanovich asked the balding little man with the gray beard.

“I think we should check in with Princess Natasha and the up-timer,” Lavrenty Belikov said.

Petr knew from experience that Lavrenty never referred to Bernie Zeppi or Brandy Bates by their names. They were “the up-timer” and “the up-timer woman.”

They were down now, so Petr called the cockpit and asked about Bernie Zeppi and Princess Natasha.

“Let me check with the tower.”

There was a shortish pause, then the captain came back on. “They’re in Denmark. In the capital, that apparently King Christian IV has named after himself. And the rumor among the radio operators is that he wants to buy the Hero they arrived in. Or at least he wants to buy a Hero. Bernie and Natasha were using the Hero to make a grand tour of the capitals of Europe or some of them.”

Petr and Lavrenty’s mission wasn’t nearly as well stocked with gold and silver as the first one, but it was well funded. So, after getting in touch with Natasha and Bernie, they took over Vladimir’s home outside of the Ring of Fire to use as their headquarters. Then they got on the radio telegraph system and contacted Magdeburg and King Gustav’s government, asking that the Muscovite Russian ambassador to the USE have his accreditation removed.

They got the runaround. The news that the Sovereign States had taken Nizhny Novgorod was met with surprise and a fair amount of consternation. The crowned heads of Europe had found a Russia torn by internal strife to be convenient. And they weren’t willing to give that up.

They’d been too busy with their own wars to take any real advantage of the situation, but the possibility of gaining territory or even just trade concessions from one side or the other had appealed to them. And, in fact, the USE had been getting excellent prices for mica capacitors from Muscovite Russia, while the Ottomans had been buying copper and steel from the Sovereign States at excellent prices. Sweden was holding on to the Baltic coast of Russia with a death grip. That meant that the government of the USE wasn’t in any hurry for the revolution in Russia to be over.

Petr and Lavrenty spent their days being shuttled from one bureaucrat to another, while Bernie and Natasha visited the crown heads of Europe.


Kristiania

March 3, 1638

King Christian IV of Denmark looked at the airplane firebox with great interest. Bernie and Natasha didn’t object. For a variety of reasons, the decision had been taken at a very high level in the Sovereign States that the design wasn’t to be kept secret. So after the king had looked at the firebox and the boiler, they removed a panel from under the skirt so that His Majesty could see the condenser. Bernie explained that part of the reason that the condenser worked was because of all the space that the ACLG provided for it. And the fans forced generally cold air over the coils of the condenser also helping the condenser work, while, at the same time, warming the air that flowed into the skirt of the ACLG.

King Christian crawled out and took a beer skin from a handy porter. He took a healthy swig, wiped his mouth, and asked about the flight controls. Bernie was again impressed by the mindset of the seventeenth century. In this world, people—at least rich, well-educated people—were convinced that they could learn everything there was to know. Christian had designed cities and ships even before the Ring of Fire. He didn’t see any reason he couldn’t design airplanes too. Nor did he accept the idea that there was anything too complex for him to understand.

To a surprising extent, that belief let him do just that. He did seem to follow the many interconnected systems that made up the airplane, while at the same time trying to figure a way to get around Gustav so that he could open up direct trade with Russia.

Handing the beer skin back to the servant, he asked, “Now that you have Nizhny Novgorod, how close can you get to the Baltic Sea? I may not own any coastal land, but I own ships. And this baby”—he patted the Hero affectionately—“doesn’t need land to land on. A ship in the Baltic could refuel it. Avoiding Gustav’s territory by flying over it.”

It isn’t a bad plan, Bernie thought, whether it will work in practice is another matter. For that matter, Gustav might argue that flying over his territory didn’t relieve the airplane of the duties owed to Sweden. But all of that was going to have to wait for summer to discover, because simply due to the weather, it was unlikely that any more territorial gains would be made before the spring flooding had passed. And even if it worked, and was legal, it was still going to annoy Gustav Adolphus, and Denmark was still part of the Union of Kalmar.

On the other hand, Bernie suspected that that was half the reason King Christian IV liked the idea. He still resented the fact that Denmark had been forced to the junior role in the League of Kalmar. In spite of the fact that his younger son was engaged to Christina and would be effectively the next emperor after Gustav, since Christina was unlikely to be interested in the nuts and bolts of rulership. But King Christian had an ego to match his intellect. He was quite sure that he could run just about everything better than the people who were running it now. Which made him a great deal like King Gustav, and quite different from Czar Mikhail. In Bernie’s considered opinion, a worse monarch. Mikhail listened, while, all too often, people like Christian, Gustav, and even Mike Stearns, didn’t.

Bernie explained again that Russia wasn’t selling any of the Hero-class airplanes to anyone. Not because they were unwilling, but because they didn’t have enough for their own use yet. “We’re making them just as fast as we can, Your Majesty. But Russia has a great deal of ground to cover. And it’s going to be decades before we have enough steel for even a single rail line to the Pacific. Even if we make a deal with the Qing to build part of it. Which is problematic because the Ming and Qing are fighting for control of China, Czar Mikhail has no desire to get into the middle of that mess.”

“But Russia still intends to rule all of greater Siberia to the Pacific coast?” King Christian sounded doubtful.

“Not exactly,” Bernie said. “Czar Mikhail meant it when he gave most of the governing power of the United Sovereign States of Russia over to the people of those states. The idea is to include the people of Siberia, not conquer them.”

King Christian snorted in disbelief, which Bernie understood. But while he understood Christian’s snort, he didn’t agree with it. Bernie had known Czar Mikhail for years now and he’d been in the constitutional convention and the private meetings leading up to Brandy and Vladimir’s exploration trip to the east. If Mikhail had anything to say about it, the lands between the Ural’s and the Pacific were going to become states, not conquered territories. And to Bernie’s mind that made all the difference.

✧ ✧ ✧

A messenger arrived with a radio telegram. Bernie read it and said, “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, but I have been called back to Magdeburg and will probably be going back to Moscow from there.”

Bernie passed over the telegram.

“Well, since you have another plane you can sell me this one,” Christian said happily.

Bernie sighed, looked the king of Denmark in the eye, and said, “No.”

“That isn’t a word that is used with kings, Bernie.” King Christian overdid the menace enough so that Bernie was pretty sure it was a joke. But not entirely sure.

“I use it all the time with Czar Mikhail,” Bernie said with a smile. “He doesn’t seem to mind.”


Magdeburg airport

March 3, 1638

As the Lydia skimmed along the runway and pulled up beside the Viki, Natasha saw Captain Irina Novikov showing Princess Christina around the Viki. Not surprisingly, she’d shown the princess around the Lydia when they’d visited Magdeburg before. King Christian was unlikely to get a Hero anytime soon, but if Gustav was willing to provide a Russian port on the Baltic, Princess Christina might well get one. Natasha had spent enough time lobbying the princess and the future prince consort on that issue the last time they were here.

Christina was in favor because she wanted her own airplane. Ulrich was considering the issue as a way of avoiding a war between Sweden and Russia, which would happen if Sweden continued to restrict Russia’s access to the Baltic and therefore trade with the rest of Europe, especially the USE.

The fans stopped and the Lydia settled to the ground. Natasha unbuckled her seatbelt, and she and Bernie exited the plane to be met by Prince Petr Ivanovich Odoevskii.

“Princess Natasha.” He bowed. “Bernie.” He nodded.

“Pete.” Bernie nodded back.

Natasha sighed.

The sun was setting in the west and there would be no more flying today.

Petr leaned in to Natasha and whispered, “We’ve been getting the runaround on the matter of the Muscovite Russian ambassador since we got to Magdeburg. Don’t they realize what the taking of Nizhny Novgorod means?”

“Drop the matter,” Bernie said, not whispering but quietly. “Of course they know what it means. At this point, they are just using him as a bargaining chip. And Czar Mikhail isn’t spending political capital on that. We need all the capital we can get to get a trade corridor through Swedish-controlled Russia.”

“Have you offered them freedom of religion?”

“Of course,” Natasha said. “The Swedes don’t want freedom of religion. The peasants are all Russian Orthodox. They’ve been converting by the sword since they took over and freedom of religion means they won’t be able to do that anymore.”

“Well, that’s a casus belli right there,” Petr said.

“Sure, but a war with Sweden means a war with Gustav, who is the captain general of the SoTF and the emperor of the USE. And we don’t want a war with the USE. The politics of central Europe are the same sort of interlocking alliances that led to World War I.”

“You don’t speak for the czar, Bernie,” Petr said. “I’m the new ambassador to the USE.”

“Not for long,” Bernie said. “Not if you start a war with Gustav.”

“Settle down, gentlemen,” Natasha said. “However, I’m afraid Bernie is quite correct on the czar’s intent with regard toward Sweden and King Gustav. Aside from the fact that the civil war has cost Russia a great deal of wealth and military strength, Czar Mikhail is something of a fan of Gustav. There may be a war if Gustav remains intransigent on the matter of Baltic ports, but not for the next ten years anyway. Russia needs to recover her strength.”

The conversation ended as Princess Christina and Irina Novikov came over. After that, they talked about the two Hero-class airplanes, how they differed and how they were the same.

The next morning, Gustav accepted Prince Petr Ivanovich Odoevskii’s credentials as ambassador to the USE, the Union of Kalmar, and Sweden.

Three hours later, the Lydia was in the air again, heading for Grantville on her way home to Russia. As they took off from Grantville the next morning, Bernie wondered how Vladimir and Brandy were doing in the wilds of Siberia.


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