CHAPTER 29
Siberia
Yakutsk
March 4, 1638
Brandy saw the ostrog from the air. Vlad was piloting and she was navigating. The ostrog was a small fort made of logs. It was a bit like Ufa had been when they’d arrived, but even smaller. They were flying at about seven thousand feet. She saw the river first. The Yana River was frozen, a shiny strip through the forest.
When the Hero landed, they were met by a Cossack named Pyotr Beketov. They knew who he was, though. He’d been sent east in 1631 before the Ring of Fire had happened. Vladimir had actually met him once in 1626. He was sent out here to collect taxes from the Buryats, a Mongolian people of eastern Siberia. He had a working relationship with the locals, speaking their language. At the same time, he was out here as a tax collector, and those taxes were furs, as well as copper and whatever gold or silver the locals had or could get hold of. Tax collectors are never the most popular of fellows.
He showed them the warehouse in the ostrog that would grow into the city of Yakutsk, or would have in that other timeline. He wasn’t all that thrilled about their mission. He was out here to collect tribute from the local tribes, not to invite them to join the Sovereign States. Which hadn’t even existed when he’d established the fort in 1632. In fact, he’d never even heard of the Sovereign States. The last he knew, Filaret was still managing the empire for his slow-witted but kindly son.
In spite of which, he gathered together the local chiefs and they held a little state convention, and sent off a delegation to see about joining the Sovereign States. The tribal leaders decided to join after a couple of airplane rides. But it still took time to work out the details of their proposal. Brandy and Vladimir weren’t waiting for the chiefs’ deliberations. They were going to see the Pacific.
Ostrog Yakutsk had plenty of charcoal. The Aldan River was just under two hundred miles southeast of Yakutsk. A refueling station there, manned by a couple of Beketov’s Cossacks and a couple of natives, was established, then they spent two more days taking extra sacks of charcoal to the refueling station. Basically it was a tent and a lean-to filled with charcoal next to a river. A marked place for them to land, take on charcoal, and fly out again. With just enough people there to make sure that there was always plenty of charcoal in the lean-to.
One more refueling station after that, and they had a workable plane route from Yakutsk to the Pacific coast. They hit the Pacific coast where the Ulya River did.
This turned out to be very useful, in that the three fueling stations between Yakutsk and the Sea of Okhotsk allowed them to fly from Yakutsk to the Pacific in just under one day. That impressed the heck out of the native tribes.
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Back among the tribal leaders at Yakutsk, they discussed the airplanes and their effects. Brandy was telling Pyotr Beketov, “There will be more planes coming over time. And sooner or later—probably sooner—we’re going to put a port somewhere around here,” and Pyotr translated. “So there will be goods from the Pacific and from Ufa, and even eventually Moscow, flowing through Yakutsk, and markets for your goods.”
Yakutsk
March 14, 1638
When they took off they had Pyotr Beketov with them as the delegate from Yakutsk. The natives didn’t love Pyotr. A lot of them hated him. But they did, in a strange way, trust him to do what he said he would, and he’d agreed to get them the best deal he could.
They still didn’t take much. Fuel, especially wood, took up room and lifting capacity in a way that fuel oil didn’t. But they had completed their mission for Czar Mikhail. They had mapped a route from Ufa to the Pacific Ocean. Actual settlements would wait for later missions and a rail line would wait for a much larger and stronger industrial base than Russia had. Until then, it was going to be airplanes and that was an incredibly small pipeline to ship the goods of a nation through.
Vlad and Brandy talked it out. The Siberian expansion wasn’t a failure. Twenty or thirty years from now, it would be invaluable to Russia. Little Mikey might well take a train to the Pacific coast, if not on his honeymoon, certainly by his twenty-fifth anniversary.
But for right now, even for the foreseeable future, the Sovereign States’ access to the West was going to have to be through the Baltic. They would just have to tell Czar Mikhail that when they got back.