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CHAPTER 19

Go East


Airfield, Ufa

December 10, 1637

Yulia watched Prince Vladimir making his inspection of the Nicky, part of the pilot’s job, not hers. Yulia was a doctor. She’d been a midwife and had learned about infection and disease transmission at the Dachas. First the Gorchakov Dacha near Moscow, then the Ufa Dacha.

As Prince Vladimir continued his inspection of the plane, Yulia walked up the steps to the lower wing of the Nicky. Yulia would be going along as the expedition’s medical expert, in an attempt to avoid killing all the locals with diseases from western and central Europe. She’d spent much of the last four years studying medicine from up-timer medical books and the last several months studying with Tami Simmons. So now she was going out to the back of beyond to inoculate the natives against smallpox.

✧ ✧ ✧

Brandy hugged Anya Tupikova, who was now married to Filip Pavlovich Tupikov, and ran the Dacha. Anya was one of the czarina’s kitchen cabinet, a small group of women who, despite their backgrounds, exerted considerable influence on the government of the Sovereign States.

She was going to miss them all, but Anya the most. She felt a kinship with the former slave that, as much as she liked Evdokia, she didn’t really feel with her.

“Keep track of things, Anya, and don’t let Evdokia screw up too badly.”

“I’ll do my best. You keep your eyes out for wild bears and Mongols out there in the wilderness.”

Brandy passed out a few more hugs, then climbed up to the plane. She was going to be the copilot. Vlad had more hours. Yury Arsenyev and Ariq Ogedei were going to be splitting the duties of flight engineer and mapmaker.

Once in her seat, she did the internal flight check while Vlad did the walkaround. Once the walkaround was complete, Vlad climbed aboard and joined Brandy in the cockpit.

Yulia belted herself into the seat.

“Steam coming up,” Yury informed them. He had gauges that told him the heat and pressure in the entire system. “Diverting steam to the condenser,” he added, turning a knob.

The Jupiter Five, on which the new Hero-class aircraft were based, had an improved airframe with less parasitic drag. It carried sixteen passengers and a crew of three for a total of nineteen. Its cruising speed was right at a hundred miles an hour. The Hero had essentially the same airframe, so the same cruising speed. However, it used external combustion, that is steam, so it spent more of its weight on the engines, boiler, and condenser than the Jupiter, so it only carried eleven passengers and four crew; pilot, copilot, flight engineer and navigator. This plane, redesigned to use wood or coal as well as liquid fuel, could carry only eight passengers plus the four crew. The extra six hundred pounds of weight had to be used for fuel.

The rest of the weight was cargo for Tobolsk and wood sacks. They were heavy canvas sacks with collapsible frames of light wood which they would use to store the wood for the firebox.

When using fuel oil, the Hero didn’t use much more fuel than the Jupiter, but it did carry less usable load. When using wood? Well, they really didn’t know yet.

✧ ✧ ✧

They needed the condensers warm because they wanted the feedwater hot when it went into the boiler. Brandy listened to Yury’s reports as she checked her own gauges and control systems, adjusting the flaps and rudder to make sure the steering system was operating well. Then Vlad came, followed by Ariq.

“Tanks topped up,” Ariq announced as Vlad was sitting down.

“Steam to the fans,” Brandy said, and diverted steam to the fans that would fill the air cushion.

“Bringing up inboard engines,” Vlad said as he pushed the two center levers forward. They’d all learned the importance of announcing their actions as they operated the plane. It was important for everyone to know what was going on and what everyone else was up to. Unlike the planes of the late twentieth century, these planes had almost no automatic systems. Everything was controlled by someone, so everyone needed to know what everyone else was doing.

The plane was moving now, down onto the icy river, floating on a cushion of air and throwing up an icy mist.

“Bringing up outer engines,” Vlad said and pushed the two outer levers, and the plane slewed a little as Vlad adjusted the output. Then they straightened out and picked up speed rapidly. It was only seconds later that Vlad rotated and they lifted off. They were on flare effect for another few seconds, then they were in full flight mode.

“Retracting ACLG,” Brandy said as she reversed the fans that filled the air cushion and ran the small motor that pulled the straps tight, compressing the skirt.

“Pulling steam from generators,” Yury said. “On batteries for now. Reducing fuel flow to the boiler.”

“Ariq, get us some bearings as soon as you can,” Vlad said. Then he flipped on the radio and talked to the controllers, giving them compass heading and rate of climb.

After that, things settled down. It took them about fifteen minutes to get to their cruising altitude of six thousand feet. By that time Ariq had bearings from three radio stations, Ufa, Hidden Valley, and Kazak Station 1, and could place them exactly and provide direction and speed. This matched quite well with the other indicators. They had a fifteen-mile-an-hour crosswind and were cruising at ninety-seven mph indicated airspeed.

“Okay,” Yuri said, “who wants tea?”

✧ ✧ ✧

Three hours later, Vladimir saw a lake and they came in for a landing, taking careful note of the compass heading and terrain features. This would be a good refueling station. There was a thin layer of ice on the lake. As spread out as the weight of the aircraft was, they still left a trail of shattered ice in their wake as they skimmed over the lake surface to the shore.

“Okay, guys,” Vlad said. “I know we still have fuel in the tank, but I want to see how this contraption is going to work. Everyone, grab an ax and let’s go gather some fuel.”

“That’s everyone but me,” Brandy said. “We are now officially in Injun territory. I will be keeping watch.”

“You just want to stay comfortable in the cabin,” Yuri complained.

“Right you are,” Brandy acknowledged happily. And he was. The inside of the aircraft was toasty warm. No matter how efficient they tried to make it, waste heat leaked into the cabin, which was just fine and dandy on a day like today.

They’d pulled up on the shore to the north of the lake and the whole lake was surrounded by woods, mostly pine. There was a lot of wood on the ground, but most of it was wet. It had snowed here recently, and the sun this morning had melted the snow into slush.

While Yulia and the boys were out gathering, Brandy put a packet of freeze-dried vegetables and pasta in a pot, added water and a beef bouillon cube to the mix, and put it on to boil.

✧ ✧ ✧

“Steam is up and we’re ready,” Yuri said.

“But we seem to be going through the wood pretty fast,” Ariq added.

“Steam to the fans,” Brandy said, turning them on. The air cushion filled and the friction decreased. The fans inflated the air cushions and leaked air out around the bottom of the plane, eliminating friction, but it wasn’t an on/off situation. You could, by the amount of power you fed the fans, control how slippery the air cushion was.

Reporting his actions, Vlad got them in the air and they were now flying completely on wood. They slowly rose to four thousand feet, and headed north for Tobolsk.


Tobolsk

December 10, 1637

General Mikhail Borisovich Shein watched the airplane make its slow, lazy circle around the town of Tobolsk and wondered if he had indeed lived too long. He’d lived longer than in that other history by more than three years so far. And every day seemed to bring more proof that he wasn’t ready for this new age.

Mikhail Romanov was winning! It was impossible, but Mikhail was still in power in Ufa, had added the Kazakh Khanate to his territory while Sheremetev was missing—and, if Shein was any judge—the “guest” of some Lithuanian magnate. Or it could be that Sheremetev was filling a shallow grave somewhere between Moscow and Smolensk.

Shein had known about the plane, of course. He’d even been starting to get a little worried when the radio message from the plane arrived a quarter of an hour ago. He could take the plane. It held only five people, two of them women.

It would be the stupidest thing he’d ever done in either life. But he could do it. He wasn’t going to, of course. It was a passing thought. So he watched as the Nicky landed on the river and pulled up on shore. Then he ordered a squad of streltzi to guard the plane as long as it was here, and went out to meet Vladimir Gorchakov and his barmaid wife.

Shein’s wife wasn’t going to like that. Maria Godunova was of the highest nobility in Russia, related to Czar Godunov. She set great store by bloodlines and propriety. She, as much as anyone, had argued against the alliance with Mikhail, seeing him as another Fyodor Ivanovich, who had died in 1598. Fyodor was both physically and mentally frail, and his only surviving son, Dimitry, was illegitimate and killed by Czar Godunov’s agents. It was based on him that the three False Dimitris made their claims of royalty.

Arguably, the whole Time of Troubles was the fault of Fyodor’s weakness.

But Mikhail wasn’t Fyodor. Given the chance, he’d grown into the position and remade Russia. Not by brutality, as Ivan the Terrible, but by . . . 

General Shien wasn’t at all sure how he’d done it. He watched from the wooden walls of Tobolsk as the Nicky circled and landed, then went out to meet Prince Vladimir and the barmaid, in peace.

✧ ✧ ✧

Brandy Bates Gorchakov wasn’t looking forward to this any more than Shein was. She’d met Maria Godunova on her way south. Godunova was a bitter old woman who didn’t approve of peasants getting above themselves. “Are you sure we can’t just shoot them?” she muttered to Vlad.

“I’m sure. Now smile, dear, and pretend you have station.”

“Welcome to Tobolsk,” General Mikhail Borisovich Shein said, not offering a title.

“Thank you. You’ve been working.” And it was true. When they’d sailed down the frozen river last winter, Tobolsk, while large for the east side of the Ural Mountains, was still basically a frontier fort. Now it was a city, a small one, but a city nonetheless.

“The summer sailing season was short, but knowing that Mangazeya was open again made a difference. Quite a lot of Russian fur went to England and the Netherlands and quite a bit of machinery arrived here. Your Catherine the Great made two trips before the ice closed in again.

“Besides, we’ve had a lot of people who ran from the boyars in Moscow come here. And we’ve gotten goods that way, as well.”

It was true. Shein wasn’t, in Vladimir’s opinion, the great general people thought of him as. He was excellent at building, training, and equipping an army, but not nearly so good at using it, which was probably a good thing. He’d built an army here in the frontier, even something of a manufacturing center, if the weapons his soldiers carried were any indication. But, from all reports, he hadn’t done much with it.

Hands were shaken and they got in out of the cold. They spent the night in the Tobolsk Kremlin and learned that while a mule train of fuel oil was reportedly on its way from Solikamsk, it would be at least a week before it arrived.

“And I’m afraid our attempts to find oil have so far failed to produce useful results, in spite of the fact that according to your books there is oil in the area.”

“Well, keep looking. The demand is only going to increase for at least the next fifty years or so,” Brandy said.

“It would help if we had someone who knew more about geology and how to find oil.”

“All I know is some vague references to salt domes,” Brandy said, which wasn’t exactly true. She had looked into the records of the oil industry in Grantville in the 1920s, but that didn’t make her a geologist or a wildcatter.

Dinner was stiff and formal.


Tobolsk

December 11, 1637

The next morning, stocked up with charcoal briquettes, they flew out, heading due east. They made it about two hundred and fifty miles before they started to run low on briquettes.

Oil was certainly the best available fuel. After that came charcoal briquettes. Wood is less energy dense than oil, but it’s also less dense, period. It doesn’t weigh as much per square foot as oil. Which meant that they could fly a good distance on the wood they could carry, but the firebox that used wood had to be bigger than the firebox that used oil. And that someone had to spend almost all their time in flight feeding wood or charcoal into the firebox, and the whole thing got dirty, and ash got everywhere.

They were looking for a place to land as the weather started to close in, and there was no place to land. The whole area was one huge forest. Then they found a gap in the trees and made it down. They were just in time. The weather closed in and they spent the next three days living in the Nicky, as the sky dropped snow, sleet, and rain on them.


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