CHAPTER 16
Ufa Boom
Ufa Dacha cafeteria
November 4, 1637
Alla Lyapunov thought the speech was exciting and clever. And amazingly cold-blooded. Much more cold-blooded than anything Sheremetev had ever done, and Sheremetev was her ideal of cold-blooded evil since he’d killed her parents. This wasn’t evil, but it was cold-blooded.
The speech Czar Mikhail had given to the people of Tsaritsyn had been recorded on magnetic paper tape. That was a special paper that had large amounts of finely ground iron oxide in the mix so that it came out brown. It had a smooth finish and it could record an oscillating magnetic field. It was three quarters of an inch wide and the tape player that it used weighed something like fifty pounds, but it produced excellent recordings. All of which she knew because she’d spent the whole afternoon a week ago being lectured about the stuff in the Dacha school.
Much to Alla’s dismay, it turned out that the Lyapunov heir in this new world had to be an overeducated nerd. It wasn’t an option. It was a job requirement. She really wished she could be back in the kitchen in Captain Petrov’s house. At least she wouldn’t have these headaches.
She bit a chunk out of her egg salad on black bread sandwich and wished she’d had one of Elina’s hot buttered croissants instead. The Dacha cafeteria had good, solid food, but it wasn’t great food.
Cook had been a master chef even before he’d gotten the translated up-time French cookbook, and by the time Anna had become Alla again, he was really great. Even the servants in Captain Petrov’s house were well fed. Especially the kitchen servants.
She finished her lunch, such as it was, and went back to school.
Dominika’s and Zia Chernoff’s townhouse, Ufa
November 4, 1637
Zia Chernoff was also listening to the speech. The baby was crawling now and was often a guest at the palace, played with by Princess Anna. And Zia’s brother wasn’t happy about the situation. It was increasingly plain that even if Muscovite Russia managed to survive, with Sweden to its north, Poland to its west, Cossacks and Ottomans to its south, and the Sovereign States to its west and southwest, and Shein’s little pocket principality to its northwest, taking on the ever-increasing power of the Sovereign States was something it was unlikely to manage.
Larisa Karolevna Chernoff was going to be the Chernoff, whatever Karol Ivanovich thought about it. And apparently Czar Mikhail, or perhaps that boy general of his, had figured out a way to make war in this new world.
Meanwhile, Dominika’s man of business was explaining, again, that they had too much money. Vasilii Lyapunov had put them in touch with a Dacha-trained “Financial Manager,” who had taken a large chunk of the money that they had in the National Bank of the United Sovereign States of Russia, the NBUSSR—which even Russians couldn’t pronounce—and invested it in businesses in consultation with Dominika and, surprisingly, with Zia. They now owned parts of companies that made glass, furniture, concrete, fabric, sewing machines, and a host of other products, which were sold from Moscow and Lithuania to the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. And the money poured in.
“The boom economy of western Russia can reasonably be expected to continue for at least another five years without even much of a slowdown. Market saturation is decades away. As fast as we can build it, they are going to buy it.”
“So what sort of investment do you have in mind for us?”
Lukyan Grinin sighed. “I am still looking into the various start-up options, ma’am. You can still lose, even in this environment, so I actually recommend we wait for a few weeks, until I have more information on several of the startups.”
Royal Palace, Ufa
November 7, 1637
Czar Mikhail and Czarina Evdokia were back from Tsaritsyn, and the family and friends were gathered for a dinner with the czar’s family. Among the guests were Alla Lyapunov, representing her “parents,” who were on the far side of the state of Kazakh, Zia Chernoff and Dominika, as well as half a dozen others.
The dessert was a French-style apple tart with whipped cream topping. They used honey rather than beet sugar in the cream, but that wasn’t the problem. The cook didn’t know how to make the pastry. It wasn’t flaky, like a French pastry was supposed to be. And the gold electroplated fork wasn’t able to cut the crust. Alla had to use the knife. It wasn’t horrible. In fact, before she’d spent a year learning to cook and reading French cookbook recipes to Captain Petrov’s cook, she would have thought it quite good. But when you compared it to an actual French pastry, it was utterly unacceptable.
Alla took one bite and left the rest on the plate. Zia Chernoff did the same. Dominika ate the whole thing, but didn’t get a lot of joy out of it. No one complained, not about the czar’s table. Czar Mikhail was an easygoing sort, the czarina less so. And considering what easygoing Czar Mikhail had done to a whole city that displeased him, no one was going to make a scene about a flat pastry.
After dinner the children were shuffled off to the playrooms. Dominika went with them and the wet nurse to watch over the baby. The playrooms were two connected rooms brightly painted using the dyes from the Ufa Dacha. They had paintings of dirigibles and flowers, dragons and cartoon dogs on the walls, and there was even a Barbie in a glass case on a shelf out of the children’s reach. There was an open chest with games, blocks, and wooden Legos. And the whole place was lit with Coleman lanterns, also out of the reach of the children.
Tsarevna Anna, seven, and Tsarevna Martha, six, were playing with the baby under the supervision of the wet nurse, while ten-year-old Tsarevna Irina and nine-year-old Alexi were trying to interest Alla and Dominika in a new board game related to Monopoly, but different. It was called Ufa Investment and the object of the game was to be the richest person in Ufa. Aside, of course, from the czar and czarina.
It used paper play money and cards, which could be placed on the spaces around the board. The cards represented businesses like foundries and clothing factories. Finally, Alla was convinced to join and promised to help Dominika, who was still very weak when it came to reading.
Of course, the subject of the meal came up and Irina was explaining about the French pastries and how they weren’t really all that good since they came from France, where Richelieu had ruined everything.
“It wasn’t Richelieu. It was the cook,” Alla muttered to Dominika, not taking into account the acute hearing of youth.
“I suppose you could do better,” Alexi demanded.
Alla knew better, she really did. But in spite of that, she answered just as belligerently. “Yes, I could!” She’d watched Elina do it every day for months, after all, and even helped when she was assigned to. She knew the recipe and the tricks, like making sure the butter was cold, and keeping the whole thing cold when you rolled it out. Which she explained.
Irina pulled a sheet of heavy rag paper and, using a pencil, laboriously wrote out “Restaurant.” She set it on a square and proclaimed, “I’m starting a restaurant on Irina Way.”
“It will be a failure,” Alexi insisted. “You don’t know a thing about making restaurants and you don’t have a cook.”
“I’ll hire Alla.”
“You can’t hire Alla. She’s the Lyapunov. And, besides, she can’t cook.”
“She’s not the Lyapunov yet, and she can too cook.”
“She can hire a cook and explain to him how to make croissants and other French pastries,” Dominika said with some authority. In her normal environment, Dominika was well named. She wasn’t the shy and retiring sort. This wasn’t her normal environment. But she was starting to get used to it and she was an adult. “On the other hand, she is the heir to what is now the senior Lyapunov line, so I don’t think you can hire her for your restaurant. But if you can persuade her to open a restaurant, you can invest in it.”
The rules as Alla had read them to her did allow for people to invest in other people’s businesses, even to take them over if they bought enough stock. It was based on the business community in Ufa, which was boisterous and chaotic, as well as amazingly complex. The game was much simplified, but it was still more complex than the up-time Monopoly had been. And whoever had come up with the design was making a fortune because the fact that the royal children played it on a semi-regular basis was known.
Then a thought occurred to Dominika. “Actually if Alla wants to start a real restaurant on the real Irina Way, I’ll invest in it.”
“It was my idea!” Irina protested, then stopped as the “reals” in Dominika’s comment registered. “Are you serious? Irina Way is some of the most expensive property in Ufa.”
“I know it,” Dominika agreed. “Our townhouse is on Irina Way, and we’re constantly getting offers from people who want to buy the land. But a restaurant on Irina Way would be within a few minutes of anywhere in Ufa and less than a mile from the Kremlin and the Dacha. Besides, Irina Way has plumbing, water in and waste out. And electrical lines from the Dacha power plant.”
The Dacha power plant was an oil-fed power plant that produced a fair amount of electricity. Not on the scale of the power plant in Grantville, but a lot.
Alla considered the offer. Her parents were in Almaty and it seemed unlikely that they would let her do it, but she’d spent a year as a scullery maid and recipe reader in Moscow. She knew how to run a kitchen. A restaurant might actually be something she could do. With the radio network, she could ask.
Almaty
November 9, 1637
The siege of Almaty was far from over, but the besieging troops had been pushed back a bit. They’d been moved far enough that the Heroes could land outside of Almaty proper and unload, then take off in relative safety, protected by riflemen with AK4.7s. And even better in a way, was the fact that they now had a radio station in Almaty, a full station with the aqualator and the tube radio, so the radio telegraph network stretched all the way to Ufa. Thus it was that the evening’s incoming radio dump included not only the position of Ivan’s war train, but also a radio telegram from Alla Lyapunov, asking permission to start a restaurant.
The notion that such messages arrived from Russia less than a full day after they were sent was enough to leave the residents of Almaty in something close to shock. The contents of the message were quite useful in bringing that shock down to manageable levels. What was it? A teenaged daughter asking her adoptive parents for permission to do something.
The question was raised “why a restaurant?” That led to a retelling by Vasilii of Alla’s adventures as a kitchen maid in Moscow while she was hiding from the Sheremetev regime. All of which made it a romantic adventure to the men and women besieged in Almaty.
The citizens of Almaty had already been heartened by the courage of their khan. Salqam-Jangir Khan had flown to the city to join them in their struggle.
Then Brandy Bates and Vladimir Gorchakov were dropping supplies out of the sky.
And now the town was abuzz with discussion of Alla’s restaurant. All in all, it amounted to an excellent distraction from the army that was still camped no more than a mile and a half from their walls.
✧ ✧ ✧
It was an army that was growing as Erdeni Batur moved more and more of his forces to reinforce the siege of Almaty. He’d had to. The planes flying in and out of Almaty were a tremendous psychological blow to his forces. Like the Kazakhs, the Zunghar hunted with eagles. The size, speed, and prowess of their eagles were points of great pride for both peoples. And here came Salqam-Jangir Khan with mechanical eagles so large you could ride in them, flying over their siege lines and delivering supplies and taking passengers over the mountains to who knew where.
It wasn’t that the Zunghar thought that it was magic. They knew perfectly well that they were made things, crafted by the same people who crafted rifles that could kill you from half a mile away and fire five times a minute or more.
But how were you to terrorize such people?
What difference did it make how strong your arm, how fleet your horses, or even how large your eagle, when your enemy could shoot your horse, then shoot you before you ever got near bow range, much less close enough to use your sword.
The bastards in Almaty were cheating, and it wasn’t fair at all.
And now, as the spies in Almaty reported, they weren’t even talking about the siege. They were talking about some girl opening an eatery and whether her parents should approve the project, as though the thousands of Zunghar outside their walls didn’t even matter.
Almaty
November 11, 1637
Miroslava Holmes watched the postern gate open and close. Determining who the spies in Almaty were was taking effort, but it was her sort of effort. It was the careful observation and the correlation of facts. Something she did well.
Deciding whether to let Alla start a restaurant was much more difficult. Because, deep down, Miroslava didn’t understand why it mattered. She knew that people cared because Vasilii told her so. But she did not know why they cared. If Alla wanted to open a restaurant it was fine with Miroslava, but as long as the food didn’t make you sick, it was all the same to her.
Twenty minutes later, the postern gate opened again and a cousin of the sultan was briefly exposed to the light.
The steam train
November 12, 1637
Brigadier General Ivan Maslov climbed down from the train car to the frozen ground. The deaerator on the steam engine was malfunctioning, but that was not a serious problem. The boiler was robust, made of steel, but almost as solidly built as a cast iron boiler might be. A little rust wouldn’t kill them, not in the next few months anyway.
Of greater importance was the frozen ground. The steam train didn’t need a rail, not when the ground was this hard. He looked around, blowing out a puff of cloud with every breath. His hands were in insulated calfskin gloves. And his “general’s cap” with its fur-lined ear protectors was keeping him sort of comfortable, but if he didn’t get back inside his eyeballs were going to freeze. One more quick look, and he climbed the two steps up to the platform and went through the door into the map room. He had a new radio message from Almaty. They’d identified the Zunghar agent in Almaty, at least one of them, and wanted to know what to do about him.
Now they could move. They still couldn’t move fast by up-timer standards, but they would be able to travel fifteen or even twenty miles an hour over flat ground and average ten miles an hour over the course of a ten-hour day.
That was a hundred miles a day. And that made Almaty no more than four days away.
He went to his desk and in a careful hand wrote out the radio message, each letter in its own little box.
Find me a good place to get trapped by a clever Zunghar cavalry force.
Make it clear that the train takes hours to convert from in motion to fort. If they catch us moving, they have us.
He handed the sheet to his aide.
“But it takes us less than five minutes to turn the train into a fort,” his aide, a brand-new second lieutenant said. “We’ve been practicing it every time the ground froze since we started.”
“I know that, Lieutenant Golovin,” Ivan said. “And you know that. It is my hope that Erdeni Batur doesn’t know that, or at least that he will choose not to believe it. The absolute best way to win a battle is to have your enemy do something really stupid.
“Erdeni Batur isn’t stupid in the sense of having trouble lacing up his boots. He’s not even stupid in the sense of never having read a book. What he is, is a hard-riding, courageous cavalry commander. Which is to say he’s stupid in the way that George Armstrong Custer was stupid.”
At the lieutenant’s blank look, Ivan grinned. If his own aide Yevgeny Golovin didn’t know about Little Bighorn, it was a safe bet that Erdeni Batur didn’t.
So how could he know about a reverse Little Bighorn?
Almaty
November 14, 1637
It took Brandy two days to find the place. A lovely little box canyon, not all that steep, but with an exit that looked good until you got into it, then got rough. Worse, it was an exit that could be relatively easily blocked.
After that, there were several actual radio messages between Brandy and Ivan, in which Brandy insisted he should avoid it, and Ivan told her to mind her knitting and let men handle the war.
They used Brandy because Vladimir could order Ivan to avoid the canyon. Brandy could only advise.
Those messages somehow fell into the hands of the sultan’s cousin. Who, a bit of investigation showed, was deeply in debt and in desperate need of cash to cover the money he’d pilfered from the Almaty treasury. This was an actual room in the sultan’s palace, full—less full now—of silver coins, including many from China.
Later that night, he again slipped out the postern gate, carrying the radio telegrams.
The next morning, three-quarters of the Zunghars rode out of the siege camp.
Box canyon
November 17, 1637
It was late afternoon as the steam train carrying General Ivan Maslov and just over a thousand riflemen, mostly from Kazak, but with a decent sprinkling of streltzi from Ufa, approached the “pass” that was actually a box canyon. It was an excellent hard point to control one of the passes into the mountains. Controlling it wouldn’t make it impossible for the Zunghars to cross the Tian Shan Mountains to reach Issyk-Kul, but it would make it more difficult.
Of course, to do that, they would need to be there first, then use the train to hold the place while they built a permanent fort.
The cars on the steam train were thirty feet long and ten wide. They had double-thick wooden walls. The simple pulling of a cord would drop the outer wall to the ground, protecting those inside and exposing the firing slits for either the riflemen or the small cannon.
There were a total of twelve cars, including the engine. Four of them carried cannons, the rest streltzi riflemen. Ivan, the young and foolish boy that he was, had rushed ahead of his cavalry escort. They were at least a day behind.
As they approached the entrance to the “pass,” Ivan was on the radio to Scout One. It was high, eleven thousand feet, a bit over two miles above the ground. It was also painted light blue on its underside. At that altitude, it was both invisible against the blue sky and silent to anyone on the ground. This was partly luck, but partly the prediction of the weather service, which used the weather data from the radio stations to produce a weather map of central Asia. That map suggested that today would be clear and cold, but tomorrow it would get cloudy, and so far it seemed to be on the mark.
Yury Arsenyev was in the front seat with a pair of binoculars, looking down at the Zunghars and reporting their movements. Of course, at this distance he couldn’t distinguish all that much. An individual horseman would usually go unnoticed, but he could spot groups of cavalry readily enough.
The Zunghars knew about the planes, but their whole lives had been spent looking for scouts on the ground, expecting scouts on the ground seen on the horizon or by a flash of movement on a hillside. They knew about planes, but all their instincts and experience suggested that they could ignore an eagle overhead.
“We have a group of about three thousand to your left as you enter the canyon. There are perhaps that many to your right front, but farther away. I think they’re going to let you in, then hit you from the side and rear. I figure two, maybe three, minutes for the group on the left to get to you from their hiding place. About twice that for the group on the right front,” Yuri reported.
“Acknowledged,” Ivan said. He looked at the map. It had been drawn by Yury and delivered by Brandy Bates Gorchakov yesterday in the Scout. Even the Scout could fly sixty miles from Almaty, land, give him a map, and fly back.
He took the map forward to the engine, and showed the engineer the route he wanted him to take once he was in the canyon.
The train was traveling over frozen ground, not railroad tracks. It had a steering wheel, and so did each and every one of the cars attached to it. What those other steering wheels could do was limited by the fact that they were being pulled by the engine, but it did give them a little control, so that the fort this train would turn into could look more like a box than a circle. Or even have an odd shape if that’s what they wanted. But, in this case, Ivan wanted a circle fort with as little in the way of corners for the enemy to focus on as possible.
✧ ✧ ✧
Ivan was still in the engine as they entered the box canyon. He knew where to look, but still couldn’t see the Zunghars. They were good cavalry, quite capable of keeping out of sight until they were ready.
Ivan waited as long as he felt he could before he tapped the engineer on the shoulder and said, “Start the fort.”
The engineer and Ivan both pulled on the wheel to put the train into the slow turn that would make the fort.
✧ ✧ ✧
Erdeni Batur was nervous and deeply angry at what he saw as the steam train coming in through the pass. His goal had been as much to modernize the Zunghar into a Mongol horde for this century as it had been about his power. But the Russians had stolen the march on him. He’d heard the rumors of the town from the future, but hadn’t believed them. Hadn’t even believed them when he saw airplanes flying over Almaliq. He still didn’t. The Germans had had centuries to develop better weapons while China stagnated and the Silk Road withered.
This wasn’t an act of a god, not of Allah or the Christian god or even one of the supernatural figures that sometimes helped or hindered those attempting to reach enlightenment. It was just the workings of men.
It had to be.
Still, the train was impressive. And if he gave them time it would be decisive. He couldn’t give them that time. As he watched the train move down the pass, start a right turn, then turn left, he knew that he was going to lose men in this attack. A lot of men. But if he waited, the Zunghar people would die, never having become a real people at all.
So as soon as he realized that the train was starting the process of turning into a fort, he gave the order and his army charged.
✧ ✧ ✧
Yevgeny Golovin in the cannon car watched the hillside to their right erupt with Zunghar cavalry and was terrified. It was his first battle. Before this, all his military experience had been in drills and war games, reading books, listening to lectures, taking tests. No one had ever shot at him in anger. There had been that drill where they crouched behind a wall while riflemen shot above the wall into another wall behind them to give them the feel of being shot at. But they’d all known that the rifles were aimed over their heads, even if not that far over their heads.
It was nothing like this. Those men out there were coming to kill him. He was so frightened, and angry with himself for being frightened, that it took him a while to realize those men out there didn’t have guns. They didn’t have AKs. They didn’t have the French Cardinals. They didn’t even have matchlock blunderbusses.
If there was so much as a flintlock pistol out there, Yevgeny couldn’t see it.
And the walls of the cars on the steam train were inch-thick planks of laminated wood. An arrow wasn’t going through those, not all the way through. The tip might make it. Someone who was leaning against the wall might get scratched by an arrowhead, but . . .
Suddenly Yevgeny was laughing. He cut it off quickly, then turned to the gun crews who were manning the cannon. “Men, don’t lean against the outer wall to rest. You might get scratched by one of those arrows the Zunghar are going to be shooting.”
They looked at him blankly for a moment, then they laughed too.
“Granted, it’s not very likely,” Yevgeny continued, “but better safe than sorry.”
The gun captain, a streltzi who’d been using cannon for his whole career and loved those cannons like they were his children, roared, “You heard the lieutenant, men! Anyone who lets one of those Zunghar arrows scratch them is going on report.”
“But, Sergeant, I was going to take a nap between rounds,” complained the powderman from the second gun, grinning all the while.
“Shut up, Gorbachev!” The sergeant sighed.
The closer oncoming attackers were still at least two minutes away from bow range. Meanwhile, the long arch the train was making as it curled into a round fort had brought Cannon Car One out of line of the right-hand group of Zunghars, and Yevgeny peered out of a shooting slit to see the second group. They were even farther away, and they were trotting their horses, which was wise. If they galloped that far, they were going to be exhausted by the time they reached the train. Shaking his head at his decision, Yevgeny said, “I’m going to climb up on the roof for a better look.”
The war train was designed by Brigadier Ivan Maslov in consultation with the Dacha. It wasn’t thrown together. It was planned. Perhaps not perfectly, but still planned. The walls extended two feet above the roof with drainage holes in case of rain, and the roof was a bit slanted so the rain would wash off. There were also ladders that could be detached or attached to the walls, making them easy to climb on the inside of the fort. With the train still in motion, Yevgeny stepped out on the train car’s platform and clamped the ladder in place on what would be the interior wall of the fort once the train stopped. He climbed to the roof of Cannon Car One and watched the battle develop.
The train was curving into a circle fort that was going to leave them facing the way they’d come into the canyon. There were two main groups of Zunghars approaching, one from the east and the other from the southwest. The one to the east was the closest, about another minute to bow-shot range. The farther group was still three or four minutes out. They would come in, fire arrows to keep the train troops heads-down, then try to go over the walls or through the cracks to get inside the fort.
The distance from ground to the bottom of the train car was three feet. The train car from bottom to roof was ten feet with another two feet of wall above the roof. That made the top of the wall fifteen feet above the ground. Even standing on horseback, that was a stretch. Not impossible, but not easy either. The real weakness was between the cars. At least that would be what it seemed like until the train stopped, and they closed the doors.
Even as he was doing that, Yevgeny realized there were flaws in the steam train’s design. There ought to be spikes or knives embedded in the tops of the walls to make them harder to climb over. And there should be hatches in the roof of the cars so that you could climb up onto the roof from inside the car.
Having seen what he could see, Yevgeny climbed back down the ladder and went back into the car. The circle was made, the engine in line behind the last car. The train, which hadn’t been traveling more than five miles per hour, came to a stop.
Yevgeny shouted, “Drop the skirt!”
The skirt was a four-foot-tall laminated wood-shield wall that was located just inside the outer wall. Dropping it meant it fell three feet, making the wall solid from ground to top. You could pry it up. It wasn’t held down, but it was heavy. It took six men pulling on ropes inside the car to lift it back into place.
The gaps between the train cars were tougher to manage. The gaps were covered with more laminated wood panels, but they were heavy pieces that had to be attached by hand. The panels came in three segments, each five feet tall, that were stacked and lashed together. And even after that, the gaps would be the weakest point in the train’s defenses.
Yevgeny and the half squad of streltzi were still lashing them in place when the Zunghar arrived.
Inside the car, the cannon was loaded with canister, a lot of lead balls in a sack designed to come apart after it left the barrel. It was basically a big shotgun loaded with elephant shot.
Horses aren’t elephants.
“Fire!” shouted the gun captain. The lanyard was pulled, the hammer hit the cap, and the cap sent a spear of flame into the powder. The powder went boom, and the canister of shot spewed into a mass of horsemen riding hell-for-leather toward the gap between the cannon car and the fuel car. The shot went into and through the attackers, leaving hamburgered horse meat and human flesh in their wake, as well as spraying a geyser of blood and viscera.
In a way it was easiest for the men and horses who got the worst of the blast. For them, it was just over. There was no time for horror or pain.
For the ones farther back or off to the side, it was hell. Friends were spread over them, and even if they weren’t wounded, they were shocked and horrified in a way that even seasoned killers had not imagined before.
There were four cannon cars, four rifle cars, the mess car, the surgeon’s car, the fuel car, and the engine in that train.
The four cannon cars broke the charge.
The riflemen actually killed more Zunghars. They could fire accurately out to two and even three hundred yards.
The five-minute fort dominated the entire pass from side to side.
But it was the cannon that killed the Zunghars’ spirit.
It didn’t happen all at once. It took time for them to realize that they’d tried to have carnal knowledge of a hornet’s nest. They lost hundreds of men, including Erdeni Batur. When they finally retreated, almost an hour after the first shot was fired, there were hundreds of Zunghars dead on the ground surrounding the train fort.
There were fewer than a dozen casualties from the train force. Most of them happened when the Zunghars had tried to go over the wall. They could do it by standing on their horse’s backs and leaping up, but the casualties involved in getting even a single man in a position to make that leap were atrocious. And once he got there, he was still facing Russian and Kazakh soldiers armed with AK rifles and six-shot revolvers. But it was those few leapers who produced the only casualties that the train force suffered from combat. Most of the injuries were caused by accidents.
Not a single golden arrow had killed anyone, even though there were thousands of arrows sticking out of the walls of Fort Train.
✧ ✧ ✧
“Golden arrows, sir?” Lieutenant Yevgeny Golovin asked.
“Another up-timer-ism,” Ivan Maslov said. “A ‘golden bb’ is the single amazing, impossible shot that hits in spite of the odds. Like your chance of hitting a plane flying over at a hundred miles an hour and eight hundred feet altitude. They do happen now and then, though not nearly so often as people seem to think. The Zunghars were armed with swords and bows, and just demonstrated why you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Their arrows couldn’t reach us through the plywood walls and their swords only came into play once, and even then the swordsman standing on top of the fuel car was shot three times with a pistol and never got within striking distance of any of our forces.”
He looked out over the carpet of dead horses and men that surrounded Fort Train. “What killed those men was ignorance. They didn’t know, and couldn’t guess, the amount of firepower we have in here. And we can do this at any siege. Even the best defenses do need armed men manning the walls, and the Zunghars with their bows and arrows might as well be unarmed.”
“And this was what happened to Colonel Custer?”
“Nope. What happened to Custer was what they were expecting to happen to us. We fell into their trap just like Custer did at Little Bighorn. They had us outnumbered ten to one. They, to their way of thinking, should have done to us exactly what Sitting Bull did to Custer. What is not well remembered is that the men under Custer fought well and killed a lot of the enemy before they died. Even without cover. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were way too smart to attack a fortified position, so they lured Custer into a trap where his men would be caught in the open. It was still a costly victory.”
“I would think it was more like the walking walls at Rzhev,” Lieutenant Golovin said.
“No, not really. At Rzhev, our idiots were going up against pike squares. Not as obviously idiotic as going up against a walled fort. So we had to put Erdeni Batur in a position where he was convinced he’d mousetrapped us. Where his reputation would be destroyed, or at least badly damaged, by changing his mind at the last minute and skulking off with his tail between his legs.
“All right, Lieutenant. Let’s start getting this mess cleaned up. Someone get us a white truce flag and let’s see about saving as many of those men out there as we can.”
✧ ✧ ✧
Jochi Qong Tayiji rode up to the small group of men standing on the wall of the magic fort. Jochi didn’t believe in magic, not magic that could do this, anyway. He just lacked a word for such a thing as stood before him. These people, whatever they were, could fly. They could make forts roll around the plains and then turn back into forts and they could kill in ways that left Jochi horrified and dismayed.
And Jochi hated them, from the first to the last. Yes, he hated them, and would until he died, and would still hate them in his next life and the one after that. But he didn’t hate them enough to kill what was left of his people on the altar of his hate.
So he rode up to the fort and the men standing on its walls. “I am Jochi, Qong Tayiji of the Olot.” He wasn’t the only Qong Tayiji of the Olot, but he didn’t need to go into that now. “What do you want?”
On the platform behind the outer wall stood a group of people. The one the others paid deference to was a redheaded youth with a neatly trimmed beard. He wore a billed cap with a star in front and some sort of gold inlay on the bill.
“Not all the men out there are dead,” said the redhead. “We have medicines and techniques that may save some of them. We are willing to do that, but not if you’re going to shoot arrows at us while we work on them. I want your word that from now until this time the day after tomorrow, your men won’t come armed within two hundred yards of the walls of our train.”
“And if I don’t agree?” Jochi guessed the answer, but had to ask.
The redhead shrugged. “Then we just wait, shooting anyone who comes in range until they all die.”
Jochi looked into those cold blue eyes and knew that this boy would do just that. There were glaciers in the mountains that would envy the coldness in those eyes.
“We will stay back,” he bit out.
“Don’t do that,” the redhead said. “Just leave your swords and bows away, then you may come in and collect your dead and call us to the aid of your wounded.”
“The ground is littered with bows and swords.”
“The Zunghar who picks one of them up dies.” The redhead waved at one of the men carrying one of the long guns. The man put it to his shoulder and pointed out at the field, said “bang,” then brought it back down.
✧ ✧ ✧
Two days of M*A*S*H surgery, and the area within Fort Train was full of Zunghars, most of whom would recover. Not all of them would have their full set of arms, legs, fingers, and toes, but most of them would live and heal.
In those same two days, most of the Zunghar army dissolved. Rode away in small- to medium-sized groups to report back to their tribes on what had happened here.
Fort Train
November 20, 1637
Two days after the trap, the Scout plane came down to a landing and taxied up to the train. Brandy got out and walked up the stairs to the open platform, then joined Ivan in the office. It had been a rifle car during the battle, but now it was back to its normal use.
“I did a flyover recon,” Brandy said. “Most of the Zunghar have left. Salqam-Jangir Khan would like you to load up and proceed to Almaty to relieve the siege.”
“There are a lot of wounded still in need of care,” Ivan said. Then, “We can put some of the worst aboard the train and leave the best off with the Zunghars that are left. It’s going to take tomorrow to get organized, then a day to get to Almaty. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow. Good enough?”
“Good enough, but I won’t be there. Vlad and I are heading back to Ufa. They have another Hero, the Koshchey, to take over the urgent material transfer. Czar Mikhail has something else in mind for Vlad and me, and he wants Miroslava back in Ufa.”
“Who got murdered?”
“Got me. We got orders, not explanations.”