CHAPTER 25
Politics
Ufa Kremlin
January 14, 1638
“You need to fire Ivan Borisovich Petrov,” Simeon Budanov insisted. “He’s completely failed to catch the leak. And at this late date, it’s unlikely that we will ever find out who it was.”
That was half true. Ivan Borisovich had, at Czar Mikhail’s instruction, failed to apprehend the leak, but Czar Mikhail knew exactly who the leak was. After a fair amount of discussion, it had been decided to leave the leak in place and simply control the information flowing through it.
“Don’t be so harsh, Simeon. We don’t want to piss off his father. You know we get a lot of tech through Boris,” Mikhail said. He didn’t mention that Boris was also providing his son, and therefore Mikhail, with a great deal of intelligence about the goings-on in Moscow and Muscovite Russia. That was information that was above Simeon’s pay grade. Also above his pay grade was the story of how the spy was identified.
“Your Majesty, he’s useless. He spends most of his time at the Diogenes Club, ordering expensive lunches and dinners that he bills to my department.”
“Calm yourself, Simeon. I’ll have a talk with him and perhaps I can get him to retire and manage his affairs in the private sector. You know that his family has several freeze-drying facilities here and in Muscovite Russia.”
It took a few more minutes, but Simeon Budanov was ushered out. Then another door opened and Ivan Borisovich Petrov came in. “So I resign without prejudice, which will calm Simeon Budanov’s paranoia. You need to put Kirill in charge of the Grantville desk.”
“I need Kirill on the China desk.” Mikhail shook his head. “The destruction of the Zunghars has scared the crap out of Güshi Khan, and the imperial governor of China’s western province.”
“The Grantville desk is important. You know Budanov is going to give it to one of his cronies, quite possibly the spy.” Even here Ivan Borisovich didn’t say the name of the agent that Ivan Romanov had placed in the Embassy Bureau.
“No, the Grantville desk isn’t important,” Mikhail corrected. “It was important and contact with Grantville continues to be important, which is why Bernie and Natasha are on their way to Grantville even now. But the Grantville desk is no longer our only source of information; we have the Ufa Dacha and your father gathering up everything Muscovy gets from the USE and sending it on to his son.”
“I thought the Diogenes Club was to focus on internal security?”
“Don’t be too wedded to twentieth-century American practice. You won’t be heading the CIA or the FBI. Your agents will operate in the Sovereign States, in Muscovite Russia and, when necessary, in other countries. Your job is to provide me with intelligence on what’s going on in the world so that I will have more than one source.” Mikhail considered, then added, “Where I want you to restrict yourself is in the scope of your actions. Your people will observe and report, not instigate or act. Spies, not saboteurs.”
Ivan bowed, then commented, “I wonder how Bernie’s doing.”
Cluj
January 14, 1638
The Hero circled the city twice and the radio did a frequency search to find the radio frequency. They found it and transmitted by voice, in clear, who they were and that they wanted to land. Clearance to land came quickly enough. But once they landed, they were met by armed men.
This had been a war zone in the last few months and the people were antsy.
It took a few minutes until they found someone who could confirm it was Bernie. The somebody was Jeff Higgins, who’d been in high school the last time he’d seen Bernie. Bernie had seen him at the Battle of the Crapper, but Bernie had been behind the logs with a deer rifle, not on a dirt bike facing down mercenaries with a shotgun. When Jeff and Gretchen got married, Bernie had been drunk in the Gardens or perhaps the 250 Club.
They got clearance, radio frequencies, and by the use of gold and silver coins they arranged gasoline—aviation fuel, that is—for the rest of the trip to Prague and hence to Grantville. They also got charts to the various airfields along the way.
Jeff, a nerd even in high school, wanted to look at the Hero. He was familiar with the Jupiter Five, the airframe of which was clear to see in the Hero’s shape.
“The condenser is in the expansion chamber.”
“Expansion chamber?”
“We ended up having to invent some of the terms since the designs that came through the Ring of Fire were less than complete,” Bernie explained. “The main hovercraft fans blow air into a wide flat chamber. That’s what we call the expansion chamber, because the air from the fans expands from a stream of air to a high-pressure zone. The expansion chamber is opened around the sides at the top. That lets the air out evenly all around the bag or skirt. It goes into the skirt, which is designed to leak air, but to leak more air inward. This, all put together, gives you areas of pressure. The highest pressure is in the expansion chamber, then the skirt, then the area under the skirt. So the skirt flexes over rough ground, leaking air all around but not so hard that it can’t get out of the way of a rock or fill hole. What we found was that by putting the condenser in the expansion chamber where there is a constant flow of air over them, we get more efficient condensing of the steam and heat the air going into the skirt, which is especially helpful in snow and ice conditions.”
“Royal Dutch had problems with the skirts and has mostly abandoned them,” Jeff pointed out.
“We have problems with them too, but by making the skirts in removable and replaceable sections, those problems are kept manageable. Besides, we don’t have enough airfields to use a wheeled, or even a skied, aircraft.”
What struck Jeff about this was how much self-centered jock Bernie Zeppi had changed. The Bernie from high school wouldn’t give credit to someone else with a gun to his head. And Jeff had been privately convinced that Bernie couldn’t count to eleven without taking off his shoes. But then again, the Jeff from high school didn’t go armed or lead an army. So clearly Bernie wasn’t the only one who’d changed.
✧ ✧ ✧
The mission spent the night in Cluj, then, using the maps and weather information provided, headed for Prague. There were several refueling stops, but they made it by the end of the day.
In Prague, they met with the regency council and recognized Wallenstein’s heir as the king of Bohemia, left a draft of a trade agreement with the regency council for them to consider, got fuel oil that had come up the Elbe from the oil fields in Germany, and took off again on January 18. They landed at Grantville Airport shortly before noon.
Grantville
January 18, 1638
After they taxied to their designated parking spot and tied down the Hero, Bernie went to the tower and asked to use the phone. “And do you know how I can reach Her Serene Highness Millicent Anne Barnes?”
The air traffic controller told him and he called the Higgins Hotel.
The phone, a down-time-made rotary dial phone that would have been right at home in the Forties, was located on a counter on the bottom floor of the tower. Besides, he’d had to go through an operator at the Higgins, who might still be listening in. So, with the ton of gold hidden under the floorboards at the center of lift of the Hero making him paranoid, Bernie said, “Hi, Your Serene Highness. Brandy Bates sent me to return your lipstick.”
There was a pause. “The whole lipstick?” Millicent asked.
“No, but a good part of it. Bring friends. Big, strong friends, and well-armed,” Bernie said quietly. He wasn’t sure why, but he’d managed to make the whole trip here hardly thinking of the gold under the floorboards. But now that they were getting ready to deliver it, he was seeing bandits in every shadow. And not just bandits. Muscovite Russia had its own embassy in Magdeburg, and a consulate right here in Grantville.
“I don’t recall. What color was that lipstick? Was it silver?”
Bernie cupped a hand over the receiver. “Gold.”
“Wait there,” Millicent Anne Barnes said. “I’ll call some friends.”
✧ ✧ ✧
Astrid Schäubin answered the phone at NESS. “Neustatter Security Services. How can we help you?”
“This is Millicent Anne Barnes. I have something of a rush job for you, transporting something from the airport to the bank.”
“Transporting what?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure. The form it’s in might be coins or bars, but it’s a fairly large amount of gold. At least, if I’m reading Bernie Zeppi right.”
Astrid kept track of the powers in the world, and the Emancipation Proclamation and the constitution of the United Sovereign States of Russia had both been fairly big news. It was well known that Bernie Zeppi was, at last report, one of Czar Mikhail’s top advisors.
She checked her books to see who was available. There were wagons and horses to draw them. She put together four teams of five men each, armed, and two wagons, just in case, gave Her Serene Highness Millicent Anne Barnes a price, and started getting the job organized.
✧ ✧ ✧
An hour later, Bernie and Natasha were having a hamburger and fries with real ketchup. They were in the Hero, eating with the crew, when Millicent Anne Barnes arrived in a steam car. She was invited in, and they pulled up the floorboards, displaying canvas sacks full of gold coins minted in Ufa from gold from Kazan and the Urals. The weight was two thousand pounds. Each coin was one ounce, so there were thirty-two thousand coins in sixty-four sacks. Each sack weighed a bit over thirty pounds.
Millicent was, by this time, used to doing business at very high levels and bank drafts in the millions of thalers didn’t bother her at all. This was just a little different.
“The guys from NESS will be here in another hour or so.”
They were, and everything went quite smoothly. The wagons were loaded with half the bags each, and they, with an escort of NESS guards, made the eight-mile trip to the bank.
In the year 1638, the Grantville bank had a very professional assaying service attached. It could weigh and test for purity gold and silver coinage quickly and accurately.
These coins were twenty-four-karat gold, freshly minted, with reeding. Several random coins were tested, then they were just weighed.
The coins were put in the accounts of the Barbie Consortium and the Stone family accounts, based on the amount that Ron Stone and Millicent Anne Barnes, acting for the Barbies, had loaned the Sovereign States over the last year since Brandy Bates Gorchakov had said it wasn’t like she was asking for Millicent’s last up-time lipstick.
Before the gold was counted, the news was all over the business community. There were two instant effects. First, the price of a Sovereign States ruble, which had never fallen to that of waste paper, but was moving in that direction, rebounded. Drastically! The second was the effect on the Austro-Hungarian thaler, otherwise known as a “Judy,” which had also been losing value since the Ottomans took Vienna, but bounced back somewhat. Because, while the gold didn’t pay either Ron or the Barbies back in full—not even close—it said two things very loudly. Russia, at least the Sovereign States of Russia, paid its debts, and the Barbies still had the knack for picking a good investment, which had the follow-on effect of improving confidence in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its chances against the Ottomans.
After all, what was riskier than loaning money to a czar in exile, and that had apparently paid off.
For the next several days, Bernie and Natasha made visits to Magdeburg, Brussels, and several other places.
Then, with a load that mostly consisted of tubes, but included other high-end stuff, they went back to Ufa, following the same route. There would be more trips now that the air route was opened. Though some of the people who had air stations along the way were going to be pissed when they learned what had been on that first plane. And future planes were likely to be examined fairly thoroughly. But that was a negotiation for later.
At least on this route, they weren’t going to have to chop wood for the boiler.
Siberia
January 18, 1638
Brandy and Vlad watched the ground ahead, looking for a likely spot.
When they’d left Almaliq they’d flown east but as soon as they had reached ten thousand feet they’d seen a large lake. It was over a mountain but only about thirty-three miles northeast of Almaliq.
They scouted the alpine lake, then flew back in the afternoon.
It turned out that the locals of Almaliq knew of the place, though it was difficult to get to without aircraft. They called it Sayram Lake. So instead of going east immediately, they took a crew to set up an air station at Sayram Lake.
That had taken four days and ten trips back and forth before they had a small village of about twenty people, aside from the fuel oil that the other Hero would be bringing. The locals would spend the rest of the winter chopping down pine trees and charcoaling the wood, and hunting and fishing so that there would be stocks of charcoal and food for the trip back.
After the Lake Sayram Air Station was established, Brandy, Vlad and crew went on.
✧ ✧ ✧
Ninety-four miles just north of due east of Lake Sayram was a salt lake. Salty enough that nothing lived in the water, though fish did live in the rivers that fed it. They named it Sal Lake and spent a few days first collecting wood and brush, then a few more searching for a place they could reach in the desert to the east of it.
Finally they found a lake that was the center of an oasis. They called it Air Station Green, because it was the only green spot they could find, and frankly, they were getting tired of naming things.
✧ ✧ ✧
Again it was load up on wood and prepare for days, then spend more days looking for a good spot for the next station. Ulungur Lake was one hundred nineteen miles north-northeast of Sal Lake. It was also occupied by one of the tribes that had made up the Zunghars. That produced a rather delicate negotiation which took more time, then took even more time, because once they learned what had happened to Erdeni Batur, they had a proposal. They very much didn’t want to be absorbed by Salqam-Jangir Khan and the Kazakh state. They also realized that they didn’t have a chance on their own, with the Kazakhs to their southwest and China to their southeast. They wanted to become a state in their own right.
Vladimir thought that was an excellent idea. Kazakh was already by far the largest state in the Sovereign States, and if it kept growing . . . Well, temptation arises in the noblest heart. Salqam-Jangir Khan was smart enough to restrain his ambition, but that didn’t mean that he and his nobles didn’t have it. And that put the whole bloody exploratory mission on hold while they picked up a representative of the Zunghars who was empowered to negotiate and make binding agreements, and flew him back to Ufa.
Shavgar
January 20, 1638
Salqam-Jangir Khan had gotten the radio message, so he was right there when Vladimir and Brandy landed. He looked at Vladimir as they deplaned and shook his head. “I thought better of you, Vladimir. I thought of you as a friend.”
“We were outside of your lands and Qong Tayiji Jochi here made it clear that he and his tribe didn’t want to become part of your state,” Vladimir said.
Qong Tayiji was a basically Chinese term that meant prince or crown prince and Jochi’s people used it about the way the Kazakhs used the word “khan.”
They spent the night in Shavgar and the next morning they had Salqam-Jangir Khan on the plane with them. They landed in Ufa, dropped off their passengers, picked up a few things that they’d learned they needed in the wilderness, and then took the southern route back.
They had letters in Chinese script from Qong Tayiji Jochi and, using that and a bit of gold, set up an air station at Ulungur Lake. Two hundred twelve miles east of Ulungur Lake was Khar-Us Lake, but from there they were moving into the Gobi Desert, where there were neither trees nor water. So they went north a hundred forty-three miles to Uvs Lake, a salt lake that wasn’t so salty that it didn’t have fish and birds living in and around it. From there they went further north over mountains to a place of trees, even if it was a place covered in snow this time of year. They found a frozen lake surrounded by snow-covered pine trees and spent several days chopping wood and loading the wood sacks to take them farther.
Ufa
January 30, 1638
Mikey was having a ball. He was stacking wooden blocks then knocking over the towers he made and laughing as they fell. He, along with Larisa Chernoff, were Anna and Martha’s favorite toys slash playmates, with nannies to oversee.
Irina and Alexi were too big for babies. Irina getting close to eleven and Alexi almost ten. Both of them were in school, or, rather, both of them were being tutored by scholars from the Ufa Dacha. It was a very different life than their early childhood. Among the bits of knowledge that the up-timers had brought was the notion that child abuse wasn’t a necessity in child rearing. That sparing the rod often produced perfectly nice kids. That notion wasn’t universally accepted, but Czarina Evdokia had accepted it and the kids had benefited.
Both children spoke, read, and wrote in Russian and English. They both also studied Latin and Greek, as well as Polish, Spanish, and French. So they were busy kids. Not that their world was perfect. Irina was, at the moment, suffering under the glare of Rodion Anosov, who was discussing her latest paper on supply chains.
“And where do they get the laminated wood?” Rodion Anosov asked.
“They buy it,” Irina insisted. “Plywood”—she used the up-timer English word—“is made right here in Ufa from the pine forest just to the east. And it’s used for everything from desks to walls and shipped up the Volga to Moscow and down to the Caspian. It’s one of Ufa’s more profitable exports, so there is plenty available for making wing struts and all the other plywood parts.”
“Good enough, but why isn’t that in your paper?” Rodion Anosov asked.
“Because it’s not specific to the airplanes!” Irina didn’t shout, but she really wanted to.
“But they are—”
“No, they aren’t!”
“Let me finish, please,” Rodion Anosov said. “The ready availability of plywood was one of the factors that led the design section to go with an internal wooden strut and doped canvas wing and body design rather than the fiberglass monocoque construction used in the Jupiters. So you see the supply chain works both ways. It’s not just ‘can you get one product,’ but ‘is another available.’
“Now. Tell me about the wing factory.”
“It’s on Anna Street,” Irina said. “Out near the Ufa River. It’s steam powered and uses drill presses and band saws to cut the wing spars and other parts.” Irina had visited the plant as part of her lessons. It employed about three hundred former peasants and was owned by the Chernoffs. At least the Ufa branch of the Chernoff family. As well as the factory was partly owned by the Chernoffs, the factory was also owned by the government of the Sovereign States and a chunk by the Romanov family.
Dominika and Zia Chernoff had invested heavily in wood products. Larisa, who was in the crib next to Mikey, was going to be incredibly rich when she grew up. And the plant used a steam engine to run dozens of machines to make the various parts that were put together into the Hero-class airplanes. It was tens of thousands of man-hours for each plane, but with about three hundred workers in the plant, it was working out to a new airframe every month or so. They weren’t turning them out like sewing machines or pliers, but it wasn’t like it was one guy in a shack either.
✧ ✧ ✧
Czar Mikhail, on the other hand, wasn’t having a great time. He was in a room three doors down, having Salqam-Jangir Khan and the Zunghar representative, Qong Tayiji Jochi, lobby him to override the congress. And he wasn’t going to do it.
“First off, I can’t. The setting of the borders between states is the business of the congress.”
“But, Your Majesty, we didn’t have any say in the setting of those borders,” the Zunghar complained.
Actually, Czar Mikhail thought the man had an excellent point, but not so good as to have Mikhail override congress when he was trying to establish the precedent that congress, not the czar, made the laws and set borders.
“But the congress has given the Zunghars lands that we could readily take,” Salqam-Jangir Khan complained.
“That the Sovereign States could take, you mean,” insisted Qong Tayiji Jochi. “Without Ivan the wizard and his war train, even Erdeni Batur would have won.”
“That’s rather beside the point,” Czar Mikhail said. “The constitutional convention determined the borders of the state of Kazakh, and in a majority vote of the congress, they confirmed those borders. Neither of the consuls have seen fit to veto the measure, and neither will I. Not to give Kazakh territory to the Zunghars, nor to give Zunghar territory to the Kazakh.”
“Your Ivan is busy,” Qong Tayiji Jochi said belligerently. “If I don’t get . . . ”
He trailed off at Salqam-Jangir Khan’s expression. It wasn’t hostile or threatening, not exactly. Salqam-Jangir Khan was smiling. A very confident smile. Not worried in the least. “Qong Tayiji Jochi, even if Ivan and Tim were going to stay busy, which they aren’t, the Zunghar alliance isn’t there anymore. And none of the four clans that made up the Zunghars can individually stand against Kazakh. The only thing keeping me from taking all of your people’s territory is the Sovereign States congress and my respect for their laws.”
And that was when Mikhail realized that Salqam-Jangir Khan was on his side. The whole thing, the impassioned speech before congress, the insistence that the Zunghars should lose territory in recompense for their attack on Kazakh. He’d never expected any of it to do anything but keep the Zunghars from getting some of the territory that he’d claimed in the constitutional congress back.
“And considering he’s setting up steam plants and aircraft factories in Shavgar, that’s only going to become more true over time.”
Qong Tayiji Jochi looked at them, and sighed. “Then I formally request admittance into the United Sovereign States of Russia with the borders as specified by the congress.”
Czar Mikhail reached over and took Qong Tayiji Jochi’s hand. “Done. Can you sell it back home?”
“I could have sold even worse terms back home. We had rather a lot of troops in the battle of the train. And the whole town saw the Hero land,” Qong Tayiji Jochi said. “I’m to get the best deal I can. But, at all costs, make a deal.”
“Maybe we should renegotiate—” Salqam-Jangir Khan started.
“And maybe we shouldn’t,” said Czar Mikhail repressively.