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CHAPTER 26

Surrender


Northeast of the Filaret crash site

January 30, 1638

The Rekaloban River was a creek and frozen besides. And there was forest on either side of it. Heavy forest with no cleared spaces for the range of the AKs to come into play. Ivan was looking at what might be the last cavalry battle in Russian history, and it was going to happen because everyone was out of position and ill-prepared.

And all because a damned snowstorm had blown through starting on the sixteenth and not letting up until the twenty-seventh. There were drifts three yards high and about two percent of his forces had suffered frostbite on hands or feet. And that was with excellent gear, fur-lined boots, heavy coats, and gloves.

His force was mostly Kalmyks. The Kalmyks were steppe people like the Kazakhs. They lived on either side of the southern Volga and ranged widely. They’d had several representatives at the congress and were spread out among the city states along the Volga. They were also excellent cavalry who’d adopted the AK4.7 carbines and the six-shot revolvers being made in Ufa and Kazan with glee. They were disciplined in their way, as long as they respected their commander.

Ivan had been afraid that they wouldn’t respect him, but after the battle of the train that wasn’t a problem. This was a different situation, though. The tactics of the battle of the train wouldn’t work. Instead, what he was forced to use were the tactics of the American colonials against the British. Guerilla war. Hide and snipe. Ambush foraging parties, then run away before the enemy could respond. This was exactly the sort of fighting that the Kalmyks excelled at and the armies of western Europe sucked at.

There was shooting in the distance. It started fast and furious, then built, and then cut off amidst angry shouting. By now Ivan could make a good guess at the course of the skirmish just from the sound. The Kalmyks were in hiding. They’d shot up one of Birkin’s lead elements, then crawled back out of sight and ran for their horses. Meanwhile, Birkin’s troops had emptied their rifles into the woods, hitting very damned little, until an officer managed to get them under control.

Ivan smiled. He had an excellent supply situation. Wagonloads of powder, shot, food, and drink coming up every day from Kazan. But Birkin’s situation was different. Every bullet fired was one less they would have at the next battle. If it weren’t for that damned airship, he’d just fall back to the walls of Kazan and let Birkin starve.

But he couldn’t do that. Just like Kazan, Czar Mikhail had insisted that it was up to Tim. He remembered the radio telegram.

To: General Lebedev

From: Czar Mikhail

The dirigible named after my father would be of great value to our nation, both logistically and politically. However, I don’t want the army risked. I leave it to your judgment whether we can afford to guard it until it’s ready to fly.

If in your judgment it is too expensive to protect, your orders are to destroy it.

And Tim, the bastard, had left it up to Ivan.

To: General Maslov

From: General Lebedev

He’s done it to us again, Ivan.

Look, I know there probably won’t be time, but do your best to keep Birkin’s army away from it as long as you can. Every day he’s trying to get to that darned airship, he’s not running for Nizhny Novgorod, which is what he should have done the minute he got word that we were here. All we have to do is keep him busy out here until his food and shot run out, and he won’t have an army.


Luck, Tim.

The snowstorm had helped, and pinprick raids using the Kalmyks had helped more, but the airship was less than twelve miles behind him, easy raiding distance. He still wasn’t sure if he could save it.


Filaret crash site

January 30, 1638

Chief Petty Officer Valeriya Zakharovna was pushing a broom. The snowstorm had covered the top of the Filaret in snow and the airship was big enough that that amount of snow represented its entire useful load. So Valeriya and the rest of her crew were walking along the top of the dirigible, pushing snow far enough away from the top so that it would slide off. Other than that and the repairs the storm had made necessary, the Filaret was ready to fly.

Her foot slipped on the wet doped fabric surface of the dirigible, and she slid down fifteen feet until the safety line caught her. Her broom went flying and followed a small avalanche of snow down off the side of the Filaret. They were using brooms, not shovels, because they weren’t going to risk ripping holes in the shell. Pulling hand over hand, Valeriya pulled herself back up to the railed top of the dirigible and went to collect another broom and get back to it.

✧ ✧ ✧

In the captain’s cabin, Captain Dimitry Ivanov sipped sweet hot tea from China and read a report. The captain’s quarters on an airship were luxurious. And overall, he was quite pleased. They’d spent the last eight hours doing steam and function tests on the four engine nacelles. The Filaret had a modified design with two boilers, one fore and one aft. Each boiler ran two nacelles, which would provide directional thrust. The branches had been cut away in the first days, then they’d had to build a framework to keep the airship stable as the storm came through, blowing high winds and dumping snow on them. If they hadn’t done that, the storm would have dragged them through the forest canopy and ripped the airship to shreds.

Dimitry Ivanov was a smart and well-educated man. He’d studied at the Dacha since mid-1632 and much of that time had been spent in the study of aircraft. He knew that airplanes, not airships, were the future of aviation. He knew it from that other history and knew it from grim experience in this history. But he didn’t like it, for he loved the huge, spacious airships.

He finished his tea and the report, then got up and put on his uniform coat with the four rings of an airship captain, put on his cap, and went to the bridge.

“All right,” he said as he got there. “Bring the boilers up to full steam and get Chief Petty Officer Valeriya Zakharovna and her crew back inside. We’ll finish repairs in Hidden Valley.”


Birkin’s camp, fifteen miles east of crash site

January 30, 1638

General Ivan Vasilevich Birkin sat on a camp chair and sipped hot broth. He held the clay cup with both hands to warm them, and looked out at an increasingly ragged army. They were low on ammunition, and lower on food. The Heroes—villains from Birkin’s point of view—had first identified, then bombed his depots. That had been less than fully successful. They missed more than they hit, but it had done enough to decrease his supplies from barely enough to not nearly enough.

But the real killer had been the storm. That had slowed everything down, and by now his army lacked food, shot, and fodder for the horses.

His scouts reported that Birkingrad was surrounded by a screen of golay golrod. They were set just outside artillery range so the forces in Birkingrad couldn’t get to him, and he couldn’t get to them. Birkingrad was kept quite well supplied by the iceboats on the Volga. So were Kazan, Ufa, and Perm. But not him. He considered surrendering just as he had considered it every day since the Filaret had crashed, but his wife and younger three children were in Moscow. His oldest boy was in Birkingrad with his cousin Iakov Petrovich. But Iakov Petrovich’s wife and children were also in Moscow. So he wouldn’t have a lot of choice if he got ordered to send Ivan Vasilevich’s son back to Moscow for trial.

There was a shout, and he saw men pointing up. In the evening sky the Patriarch Filaret flew east over his camp at three thousand feet or more.

He looked around at the men in his camp, and realized that he might face a mutiny. His army was better than half Cossack at this point. Mercenaries hired by the government as more and more of the regular Russian troops had defected.

Mutiny. Suddenly Ivan Birkin smiled. It was a bitter and sardonic smile, but he smiled nonetheless.

That was his way out. He called over his staff, his few truly trusted staff, and two of the Cossack commanders.

✧ ✧ ✧

Ivan Perebiinis, commander of Cossacks, was nervous about the summons. He knew what the dirigible meant as well as the Russian general. He was a registered Cossack out of southern Lithuania. And he was seriously thinking about taking his men and going back to Lithuania.

“Ivan.” General Birkin waved him closer and he and the other officers leaned in. “I need you to do me a favor.”

“What favor is that?” Ivan Perebiinis asked cautiously.

“I need you to mutiny, take me and these other officers prisoner, and turn us over to the Sovereign States army.”

“What?” said another Russian officer.

“Think it through, Petrov. Think it through.”

That was good advice, so Ivan Perebiinis took it. He thought about what it would mean. It would protect General Birkin because he didn’t surrender his army to the Sovereign States. It would get the army fed, including Ivan Perebiinis’ Cossacks. It would probably get Ivan Perebiinis a nice reward from the Sovereign States.

“And after I turn you over?”

General Birkin shrugged. “Take your men home. It’s not like Ivan Romanov has your family hostage.”

Ivan Perebiinis looked around the command council. Right now they were all shocked and considering it. They weren’t ready to act, but give them time, and at least one of them would decide that their honor required them to refuse.

He pulled his pistol and pointed it at Birkin. “You’re under arrest, General Birkin. The rest of you too.” Then he looked around the little group. “He’s right, gentlemen, and even if he’s not, I’m committed now. So put your guns on the table or die.”

✧ ✧ ✧

It was two hours after dark that the party with white flags flying approached Ivan Maslov’s camp. Ivan was busy getting his army ready to retreat back to Kazan. Not because he was afraid of Birkin, but because Birkin didn’t matter anymore, not since the Filaret flew off east.

This, however, mattered. He sent a radio message to Ufa and to Tim in Perm, letting them know that he had some twenty thousand prisoners.


Perm

February 2, 1638

“I don’t believe it,” General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev said as he passed the radio telegraph printout over to Anatoly Gregorovitch Stroganov.

“Why not? You’ve been singing the praises of your friend Ivan Maslov since you arrived here,” Anatoly said. “I’m the one who shouldn’t believe it.” He looked back at the telegraph, then he looked at the maps in the half-rebuilt war room. “And, oddly enough, I do believe it.”

“It’s not that. I didn’t think Birkin had the guts to surrender. Or the brains for that matter.”

“Huh?”

“Moral courage. Not physical.”

“He didn’t. That Cossack, Ivan Perebiinis, captured him and surrendered the army.”

“Without the army fragmenting?” Tim asked. “I don’t buy it.”

“Buy it?”

“It’s an up-timer phrase translated,” Tim said. “I don’t believe the story that telegraph tells. Birkin’s internal security is quite good. We wouldn’t have known about the supply dumps if we hadn’t been incredibly lucky.”

“Yes. How was it that you and Maslov were scouting just in time to catch Birkin making his run? What were you looking for?”

“Why, a way to capture Birkingrad,” Tim laughed. The secret of the spy was still tightly held. So tightly held that he didn’t know the details, aside from what Birkin was doing and the fact of the supply depots Miroslava Holmes had figured out. That and the fact that for political reasons Czar Mikhail had determined that no further action should be taken.

“What was that magical plan of yours to take Birkingrad?”

Tim grinned. “But, tovarich Stroganov, if I told you that, it wouldn’t be magic.” Then he laughed.

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“Not for your weight in gold, sir,” Tim said. Anatoly Gregorovitch Stroganov was a big man in his late fifties, going somewhat to fat. It would be a lot of gold. “Having a secret way to capture a walled and defended city is worth several cities. And once you tell someone, it’s not a secret anymore. And the enemy can start figuring out ways of defeating it.

“In the meantime, we need to gather up every iceboat in the city and get them on the ice and on the way to Kazan.”

“Why?”

“Because with Birkin out of the way, we can invest Nizhny Novgorod before the spring thaws.”

“That’s the war!” Anatoly Gregorovitch Stroganov said. He didn’t sound happy.

“Not necessarily. Moscow is now thoroughly in the hands of the most conservative boyars, the sort who would rather see Russia burn than change. What it will do is deny Moscow access to the Volga.” Moscow accessed the Volga by way of the Oka River. “And that we will be in a position to push northwest along the Volga, bypassing Moscow, and getting to the Swedish-held Baltic Sea. At that point, it won’t matter much if Moscow surrenders or not. Not militarily, anyway.”

“It will still matter politically,” Stroganov said, but Tim could tell that wasn’t what he was thinking about. Perm still wasn’t a state in the United Sovereign States of Russia. It had let the Sovereign States come to their aid and defend their walls, but it had still refused to join, maintained its independence in an attempt to wrest a better deal from Ufa and Czar Mikhail. Mostly because the Stroganov family wanted Siberia as their tax farm. They wanted the wood, animal pelts, and ores from Siberia and they wanted, later when they had the drilling equipment, the Siberian oil fields that had been Russia’s major source of income in the late twentieth century.

And Anatoly Gregorovitch Stroganov was looking at the map and considering the mission that Vladimir and Brandy were on. The Sovereign States of Russia were going to completely surround Perm for hundreds or thousands of miles in every direction, except through Tobolsk and Shein. And who knew how long Shein could hold out.

He looked at Tim and saw Tim looking at him.

“How long would it take you to take Perm, General, if you were outside the walls?”

“I wouldn’t take it. I would just block it off from your mines. That’s the source of your income. You would wither in a year. Probably less. You, personally, would probably be deposed by your family within a month or two.”

“Moral courage, you said?” Anatoly asked. “What is my best move here, General, for my family.”

Tim remembered that the Stroganov family had a branch in Moscow, very much under the thumb of Ivan Romanov and the boyar council. That part of the family included two of Anatoly’s sons.

“The best thing you can do for this town, all the people living in it and all the miners and farmers surrounding it in smaller villages built around farms or mines, is to bring Perm into the Sovereign States. As for your family, those in Ufa are perfectly safe. None of them are hostages for your good behavior. If you order me and my troops out of the city, we’ll leave. But you mentioned moral courage. Best for your people, even your family in the long run, is to join the Sovereign States. That, sir, is my honest opinion.”

“I’ll see about sending the iceboats to Kazan. Would you radio Ufa and ask them to send a plane to take me there?”

“Yes, sir,” Tim said, and gave the order.


Ufa

February 2, 1638

Czar Mikhail read the radio telegraph and wondered where he was going to get another airplane. The ones he had were all busy. The Scouts were busy in Kazakh, scouting the eastern border. Three of the Heroes were also in Kazakh, shipping urgent supplies in both directions. Russia still had two seasons: winter and construction. The trains could travel on the ice, but the riverboats couldn’t, and the iceboats carried a great deal less. So the Heroes were called into service. And he had two Heroes off in the back of beyond, exploring Siberia and in western Europe, trying to restore Russia’s credit rating. And while they had two airframes ready to go, the holdup now was the steam engines. The boilers and condensers too, but mostly it was tooling the steam engines. “He wants me to send him a plane,” Czar Mikhail complained to Evdokia. “And just where am I going to get a plane?”

“Use the Princess Anna,” Evdokia said, “or, if it’s ready, the Filaret.”

“That’s an excellent idea, my dear.”

She looked up from the book she was reading. It was a romantic comedy set in an airship in the year 1658 and the airship was traveling from Ufa to the new Russian colony in America, located where San Francisco was in that other history. They had televisions in the lobby showing plays broadcast from Grantville and retransmitted all the way to eastern Siberia, where the dirigible was at this point in the story. “Yes, definitely the Filaret. And if the weather is going to be clear, we should take the children. Fly to Perm, pick up this Stroganov fellow, and then fly to Moscow.” At Mikhail’s look she added, “Staying well above cannon and rocket range. Ten thousand feet ought to be high enough. Then come home, which will have given us time to explain the situation to Stroganov. And by the time we land, Perm joining the Sovereign States will be a done deal.”

The weather reports, by this time, were based on a solid network of radio telegraph stations which had weather stations attached. They went east into the Ural Mountains and farther in Kazakh, and west all the way to the Polish border. Both sides in the Russian civil war shared meteorological information with the other, because whatever the governments wanted, the farmers who lived around the individual radio stations wanted the information shared. Both Dachas, the one outside Moscow and the one in Ufa, issued daily weather reports that were about eighty-percent accurate out to two days. In other words, about up to World War II standards.

Mikhail picked up a phone. The royal residence had phones, and those phones went to the Ufa Dacha. They used an operator. “Please connect me to the weather department.”

This was winter so the sun had set and everyone important had gone home for the night. The clerk in the weather station wasn’t expecting a call from the czar.

“Bureau of Politics. We tell you where the windbags are.”

Mikhail laughed. “That’s excellent. But for right now, I need to know what the latest report on the weather is for tomorrow.”

“Ah, who is this?”

“The head windbag. Czar Mikhail.”

“Ha!” came from Evdokia. “You haven’t heard Senator Borgof pontificate.”

It took Mikhail a few moments to get the clerk to calm down and a few more for the latest reports to be fed into the aqualator bank and a weather map to be printed on the dot matrix printer. Evdokia was back in her book by the time the clerk told Czar Mikhail that the weather tomorrow would be mostly clear with a light breeze from the southeast. “Excellent. Please forward copies of that report to Hidden Valley, General Tim in Perm and General Maslov in Kazan. Have a nice evening.” He hung up and called the radio telegraph room, asking that a message be sent to Hidden Valley, asking about the readiness of the Patriarch Filaret. And if it was ready, seeing to it that it was sent to Ufa first thing in the morning.


Ufa

February 3, 1638

The dirigible hangar at Ufa was unfinished, but it had a mooring pole and stairs for loading and unloading. So it was bright and early on the morning of February 3 that Czar Mikhail, Czarina Evdokia, Princess Irina, Prince Alexi, Princess Anna, and Princess Martha were all waiting to board. The children were arguing about what the Patriarch Filaret should be renamed. Alexi and Irina because they’d been cheated out of theirs, and Martha insisting that since the last dirigible was named after Anna, it was her turn.

Their parents were mostly ignoring the argument since Mikhail didn’t have any intention of changing the name. It was, after all, named after his father, whom he loved, even if he hadn’t liked the man all that much.

The Filaret was docked and the ramp from the gantry to the passenger section of the Filaret was in place. They boarded as the children argued. It was a pleasant three-hour trip to Perm and a fairly tedious few minutes as they winched up Anatoly Gregorovitch Stroganov. A chair attached by a hemp cable was lowered to the ground and Anatoly sat in it and belted himself in. Then the electric winch was engaged, lifting the chair to the height of the dirigible, where it was brought inboard and tied into place. At this point, a moderately frightened Anatoly Stroganov unbuckled and stood up, swaying a little. Mikhail, Evdokia, and the children were there to greet him.

They escorted Anatoly to the galley, a large dining area with many tables and angled windows so you could look out and down at the terrain. “I know that the airplanes are more efficient,” Evdokia said with a sigh. “But I honestly much prefer the dirigibles. There is something glorious about sitting at a table having tea and little cakes as the world floats by beneath you. Don’t you think so?”

Anatoly Stroganov had flown once before and he’d boarded the airplane that time while it was on the ground. Then he’d been in the plane the whole time, looking out a small window. This time he’d been sitting in the chair as it was winched up from the ground. In the open, just sitting there in the chair. And yet he was inside again, looking out large angled windows at the ground thousands of feet below them, in a quiet, comfortable room. It was terrifying, but not in any immediate way. It was the idea that was terrifying.

The czarina loved flying. She was as comfortable in the sky as on the ground. Seven hundred miles and a bit more traveling west-southwest with a trailing wind. But it was still after dark before they got to Moscow. They could see Moscow quite clearly. Seven years after the Ring of Fire, Moscow had electrical generators and strategically placed arc lights. If any people looked up, they might see the Filaret, but that was unlikely. This trip wasn’t about being seen in Moscow. It was about letting Anatoly Stroganov see Moscow from the sky, so that he would understand the way the war was going. No, more than that, to make him feel it, feel it in his bones.

They had spent the day with Mikhail trying to convince Anatoly Stroganov that Perm should join the Sovereign States and be a free state. But in spite of the persuasive effect of the Filaret, Anatoly wasn’t budging on that. Perm would enter the Sovereign States as a slave state.

Mikhail didn’t like that, but he was now a constitutional monarch, not a dictator. It would be up to the congress and the congress had enough slave states so that it would accept Perm’s preference. They’d be back to square one.


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