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CHAPTER 11

Almaty


Zunghar camp one outside Almaty

October 24, 1637

Sultan Soqay stood at the edge of the camp and watched the puffs of gun smoke from the walls. And listened to the crack, crack of the . . . ? The things over there.

There were two rifled muskets in his camp.

Two!

And the other camps had none.

The Kazakhs had at least ten and possibly twice that. It was the fear of those rifled muskets that had decided him that a siege was better than an assault. The walls and the fact that he lacked scaling ladders or any other siege equipment had also contributed to his decision. But knowing that he was likely to lose most of his top officers in the first rush had undeniably been a factor. And, though he would never admit it publicly, knowing that he would probably be among the casualties played a role as well.

Then the little flying thing yesterday. Little. He snorted to himself. It hadn’t seemed little yesterday. It had seemed huge. It wasn’t until the big one landed today that it became little by comparison.

The Kazakhs could fly! Like gods!

Sultan Soqay jerked his mind away from such thoughts and went back to the puffs of white smoke and the crack, crack, crack from the walls. That, he could almost understand. He was familiar with Chinese muskets, after all, and Erdeni Batur’s spies had reported that the reason that Salqam-Jangir Khan had attacked the Russians, then joined them, was to get a new type of muskets that were said to be much better than the Chinese muskets the Zunghar were familiar with. Apparently that wasn’t all they’d gotten, but the short muskets were enough, never mind how they were delivered. Four men caught out in the open, armed only with the short muskets, had killed six horses and four men. Behind the thick walls of the city, with who knew how many of the short muskets, they would destroy his army. Not just his officers, but his army. His clan would die trying to take Almaty and he wasn’t prepared to do that, not for Erdeni Batur.

On the other hand, if he were to abandon the siege, Erdeni Batur would have him killed. He looked around at his officers, brothers and cousins all, and decided. “We’ll maintain the siege, but that’s all. If Erdeni Batur wants Almaty taken by storm, let him storm the place.”


Brandy’s Cove, Issyk-Kul Lake

October 24, 1637

They had landed under lowering clouds, and were socked in for the next three days, which gave Vladimir, Brandy, Miroslava, and Vasilii plenty of time to worry over how they were going to deliver supplies to Almaty. The hard landing outside of Almaty had trashed the air cushion skirt on the Nicky. They had a spare, but that sort of maneuver was to be avoided as much as possible. It was hell on the skirts. The good news was that even with the skirt in tatters, they got enough of a pressure differential to get the bottom wing off the ground, which was all they had to have to take off. But it was bad for the plane.

✧ ✧ ✧

It was on the second day that the idea of parachutes was brought up. And it wasn’t even in the context of supplies. It was Brandy telling Miroslava about Valeriya Zakharovna, a woman who’d parachuted from the Czarina several times before the dirigible crashed in Berlin.

“Could we do that with supplies?” Miroslava asked.

“Yes. They dropped supplies in World War II over Bastogne. Of course, the supplies landed in places the Germans held. So we’d have to be careful. We don’t want to deliver a bunch of AKs to the Zunghars.”

The AKs had longer effective range than the pistols by an order of magnitude. If they could get a couple of hundred AKs into Almaty with ammunition and good firing platforms, no place within half a mile of the city would be safe for the Zunghars, and at that point landing the Nicky might become practical. Might .

Meanwhile, they were still socked in, so they spent their time fishing, purifying water, eating freeze-dried stew, and wondering how things were going in Almaty.


Almaty

October 25, 1637

“Where are your airplanes, Salqam-Jangir Khan?” Sultan Aidan Karimov asked, not in censure, but clearly concerned as the sun set in the west. It had been a clear day.

The radios were heavy devices and the ones used for ground stations were heavier still. Not the sort of thing you carry in a backpack. Not even the sort of thing that the Scout could carry in a single trip over the mountains. All of which meant they were out of communications for now.

Which was already something that bothered Salqam-Jangir Khan. “I don’t know. I wish we’d been able to bring a radio.”

“Do airplanes come up lame as horses do?”

“No, but they can have mechanical problems. But that can’t be it. Not with two of them. They can’t fly in bad weather, but—” He waved at the clear sky.

“Your camp is on the other side of the mountains. The weather could be different there,” Karimov said. “It’s a week’s travel on a good horse, but I’ve hunted across the mountains and the weather can be different.”

“I hope that’s it,” Salqam-Jangir Khan agreed.

“It could be,” Karimov said cautiously. “It rains often around the lake.”


Brandy’s Cove, Issyk-Kul Lake

October 28, 1637

The weather was clear and the Nicky was going to fly back to Pishpek to start the process of getting silk for parachutes. Silk was the lightest fabric available, and if woven tightly was among the best for holding air, so made the best parachutes.

Brandy would go to Almaty, in hopes that there would be a clear space to land the Scout.

“Don’t land unless you’re sure you’ll be able to take off,” Vladimir told her.

“I’ll be fine, Vlad. You just see that you don’t get lost.” They kissed and climbed into their respective planes.


Almaty

October 28, 1637

Brandy’s flight path was partly cloudy, but not that bad and it cleared up near Almaty. Brandy made a pass and then brought the Scout in on the canal. It was long and straight, and the buildings around it were far enough away for her wings to be safe. The two buildings that had butted up against it were gone now.

The landing wasn’t difficult. The Scout was a slow plane to begin with, so it had a low stall speed. She couldn’t do the reverse thrust on the fans that the Nicky did, but she did reduce power to the ACLG as soon as she was down and floated over to the edge of the canal. She didn’t have a passenger this trip. Instead, she had a hundred-pound barrel of corned powder.

She opened the door and climbed out to see the citizens of Almaty staring at her in shock. Specifically staring at her chest, then her hips, and finally to her face. She looked at their expressions, which were going from shocked to outraged, and realized that Salqam-Jangir Khan had failed to mention that the pilot of the Scout was a woman. Luckily, he was right here to introduce her.

“This is Princess Brandy Bates Gorchakov,” Salqam-Jangir Khan said. “She’s from Grantville, the town from the future that arrived in Germany in 1631. Later she married Prince Vladimir Gorchakov, one of Czar Mikhail’s closest advisors.”

And Brandy realized that the omission had been intentional. What she didn’t know was why. Brandy had a PPK, just like Miroslava and Salqam-Jangir Khan. The guns were about twice as expensive as the revolvers, but the real expense was the brass rounds full of smokeless powder. They cost a lot. Way too much to equip an army with, but not too much for a few wealthy individuals. And by now Brandy was very wealthy. Now, she casually dropped her hand to the PPK in its holster on her hip.

A few expressions got even more disapproving, but they all got more cautious. She looked at Salqam-Jangir Khan. “I brought some black powder. We were socked in at the cove the last couple of days. And Vladimir is on his way to Pishpek to get silk for parachutes.” Brandy was speaking in Russian. She didn’t speak Kazakh well enough to make herself understood, and Salqam-Jangir Khan was quite fluent in Russian.

However, his fluency wasn’t shared by the people of Almaty, at least not most of them. Only a few Russian explorers had gotten this far east, and most of those had been well north of here. There were a lot more people here who spoke some variety of Chinese than who spoke Russian. That would change, or would have, in that other timeline, but for now Chinese and Tibetan were the main influences on the Kazakh these people spoke.

“What about a radio?” Salqam-Jangir Khan asked.

Brandy shook her head. “Too heavy. Not the radio itself. The antenna and power supply.”

“Isn’t there a radio in your airplane?” a young Kazakh asked in accented Russian. She looked at Salqam-Jangir Khan, who nodded.

“This is Baurzhan Karimov, Sultan Karimov’s grandson. I imagine he’s been talking with Dilnur and Miras.” Salqam-Jangir Khan grinned, and Brandy rolled her eyes. The khan’s bodyguards were an “interesting” pair.

She figured she’d better explain. She pointed at the wing of the Scout. “The antenna in the airplane is built into that; it’s actually laminated into the surface. The power supply runs off the Scout’s engine. Again, it’s built in, and the radio itself is a version that’s stripped down for weight,” she told the young man, who looked more confused than enlightened.

“Never mind. Get some help and unload the corned powder. Then set guards around the Scout. Princess Gorchakov, as soon as you’re done supervising Baurzhan here, please join his grandfather and me for tea while we discuss the reinforcements that Czar Mikhail is sending us.”

Brandy looked around and a part of her thought that maybe leaving a lone woman in an Islamic crowd wasn’t the best idea in the world. But she’d felt the same thing before and she knew what Salqam-Jangir Khan was up to, and she approved of it. She was flatly unwilling to be sent to the harem to adhere to down-time Islamic notions of propriety. So she went about her business mostly ignoring the crowd.

✧ ✧ ✧

About twenty minutes later, Brandy was escorted into a nice room with walls inlaid with blue and white designs. Tea was brought and the women who brought it retreated. Brandy didn’t know if they were servants or the sultan’s wives. Brandy’s West Virginia sensibilities had been widened a bit by her travels, but she still wasn’t comfortable with the situation. Her inclination was to be belligerent, but a look from Salqam-Jangir Khan was enough and she decided that, for the moment, she would be diplomatic.

“So where is Brigadier Maslov?” Salqam-Jangir Khan asked, after taking a sip of the hot tea.

“The last word we have is that he’s stuck in the fall mud, halfway to Shavgar. Trains are heavy. They don’t do well in mud.” She looked at Salqam-Jangir Khan, still unsure what he wanted her to say. But he nodded and waved for her to continue. Okay, screw it, she thought. “Frankly, Salqam-Jangir Khan, I think we messed up. By the time Ivan gets here, it’s going to be all over but the shouting. At least, it will unless this Erdeni Batur has more than a bunch of bow-wielding horsemen in his army.”

Salqam-Jangir Khan leaned back on the pillows, grinning, but he said, “Not at all. Oh, I don’t disagree with you about the final outcome, but the real point of Ivan’s train has more to do with my Kazakhs than Erdeni Batur’s Zunghars.”

That was less of a surprise to Brandy than the fact that Salqam-Jangir Khan would say it here in front of the Sultan of Almaty.

“Is the Russian czar so wise?” Sultan Karimov asked.

Salqam-Jangir Khan grinned at the old man. “Mikhail Romanov’s biggest problem is that he is a bit too smart for his own good. He has a tendency to overthink things. Which is why Bernie Zeppi was such a gift from Allah.”

“How so?” Sultan Karimov asked.

“Bernie is a good man and not really stupid, but he is no mental giant. What he is good at is cutting to the heart of the matter. ‘Sacking the quarterback,’ as he would put it.”

Sultan Karimov was now just looking confused and Brandy was reminded that Salqam-Jangir Khan had been in the room when such things as the slavery issue had been decided in the constitutional convention. “Three fifths of a man.” At least they were spared that abominable compromise. Suddenly Brandy was grinning as she remembered that if they wanted representation in congress, the women of Kazakh would have to be given the vote. Moreover, would have to vote. And their men weren’t allowed to tell them how to vote.

And she realized why Salqam-Jangir Khan had failed to inform them that Brandy was a woman or an up-timer. He wanted the full impact of her climbing out of the airplane, a woman, face uncovered, flying a plane and bringing them gunpowder, before they got to the bit about her being an up-timer.

“To answer your question, yes, Mikhail does know that Ivan Maslov’s war train, with its cannon and its armor, and the ability to roll up a hill and have a fort in place in minutes, will have as much of an effect on the Kazakhs, whose territory he runs that train through, as it will on the Zunghars in battle. His problem is that he is afraid that they will feel that they are being invaded. And some of them will.

“But my people are a practical people. They will feel like it is an invasion, but they will know that if I hadn’t made the deal, if we hadn’t joined the United Sovereign States of Russia, sooner or later, that train would be coming anyway, and it wouldn’t be coming to save them from the Zunghars. It would be coming to take their herds.

“And they will realize that a train that carries cannon can also carry cattle to market, and goods back from that market to make their lives better.” He gave the sultan a straight look and went on. “That’s what I wanted you to see when Brandy, here, climbed out of the airplane. Change is coming whatever you do. Embrace it, and it can restore the Silk Road and make Almaty greater than it ever was before on the wings of airplanes. Reject it, and it will come anyway. It will just crush you under the wheels of armored trains.”

The look Sultan Karimov gave Salqam-Jangir Khan wasn’t happy. And the look he gave Brandy was worse. But, finally, he bowed his head. “It will be as the khan commands.”

Brandy wondered when Ivan would get here.


On the rail line

October 24, 1637

Ivan Maslov climbed into the car and looked at the rail line. This section had about four miles of track, then they would be back to mud. But the mud was starting to dry. It would be frozen in a month, and once that happened, the train would be very fast. The rest of the men climbed back aboard. They were happy to get off while it switched from land to track, a process that had to be done one car at a time. It was good to get away from the vibration for a little while. They moved best just after dawn, when the ground was better than half frozen, but they had light to see. They’d been making steady progress since the twentieth and there was only one more untracked stretch before Alty-Kuduk.

Ivan heard a noise, and looked up to see a Hero-class airplane. He waved, and the plane wagged its wings.

An aide called, “General, we have a radio message from the Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. They want to know if we want them to land?”

“Why would we want that?” Ivan asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. Tell them to go ahead and land. I’ll find out in person.”

✧ ✧ ✧

A few minutes later, the plane landed and a middle-aged woman got out. She hopped off the lower wing, which doubled as the air cushion platform, trotted over, and saluted.

Ivan returned the salute. “Captain Novikov, nice landing.” Which was generous. The landing had been hesitant and she’d overshot and had to turn around and come back.

“Thank you, General, but, no, it wasn’t,” Captain Novikov admitted. “And the truth is, that’s half the reason I wanted to land. We need the practice. Especially we need practice landing in the field, where we don’t have the tower telling us we’re too low or too high, at the wrong angle or off our glide path.” She shook her head. “We need the practice on everything. The other reason is we could use some fuel oil. The Tina’s proving to be a thirsty lady.”

The train had a whole train car full of fuel oil. It was right behind the engine and the engine used a lot of it. But topping up the Tina would make no material difference in their range.

“Certainly, Captain. Are you heading for Alty-Kuduk?”

“I would have been if I hadn’t seen you, but I think I’ll head straight for Shavgar.”

“Is that in range?” Ivan asked as Gregory Petrov jumped down from the Tina’s lower wing with a jerrycan. He was wearing a sublieutenant’s uniform with an Air Corps tab on his left shoulder. The uniform was new, but then again all uniforms in the Sovereign States armed forces were new. They were the result of the introduction of sewing machines after the Ring of Fire, making uniform clothing practical for governments to buy for their soldiers. In the spirit of newness, the Air Corps had gone with zippered jackets rather than buttons.

Gregory Petrov carried the jerrycan over to the tanker car and, under the direction of one of the train crew, filled it with fuel oil. Then he ran back to the Tina, opened a cover, unscrewed a cap, and poured the fuel oil in, and started another trip.

Watching, Ivan said, “This is going to take a while, Captain. Why don’t we go look at maps?”

In the car, Ivan pulled maps out and between him and Captain Novikov, they refined their present position, the distance and direction of Shavgar. “I make it four hundred and thirty miles, Captain,” Ivan said. “The Jupiter Fives have a range of around four hundred miles. And if the Hero class is proving to have less range . . . ” He shook his head. “I can’t approve such a risk, Irina. Get more practice landing at Alty-Kuduk.”

She looked stubborn and Ivan said, “That’s an order, Captain. We need that plane in operation, not sitting on the river waiting for a fuel barge.” They did, too. Even after hard winter set in sometime in November, it was going to take a month to get the war train to Almaty. And even then, there was going to be Almaliq. “We are going to be doing the Berlin Airlift into Almaty for months before the train can get there.”

Captain Novikov looked confused. It was understandable. Captain Novikov was out of the Ufa Dacha and the widow of a deti boyar who looked to the Gorchakov family. She was involved in designing the airframe and with Czarina Evdokia, Brandy Gorchakov, and Princess Natasha all pushing, she’d gotten a commission in the army as a captain in the Air Corps. And still a lot of the officers were very unhappy about it. They were sort of okay with Brandy flying. She was an up-timer and the standard rules didn’t apply. But that attitude didn’t apply to Irina Novikov. She was just an ordinary Russian widow with an engineering turn of mind.

Ivan was okay with her, except he wished she was designing new airplanes, not wasting her intellect flying them. She was, after all, about the best aviation engineer that Russia had. But he spent an hour explaining about the Berlin Airlift after World War II, and explaining what World War II was, and then the Cold War. Irina had an engineering turn of mind, but very little interest in military history or history in general. Especially not that other history that now would never happen.

But she got the idea that she would be spending long hours flying for the next several months, which almost made her okay with skipping the shortcut.

“Very well, sir!” she said stiffly. “But we need better maps and we aren’t going to get them flying back and forth over the same ground.”

“Isn’t that the Scout’s proper job?”

“Not really, sir, no.”

Apparently she wasn’t going to drop the “sir.” Ivan was just past twenty and Captain Irina Novikov was rapidly approaching forty and she wasn’t thrilled to be taking orders from boys barely old enough to grow a beard. Well, Ivan wasn’t thrilled to be giving orders to women older than his mother, but that was the job.

“Why not, Captain?”

“The Scouts have less range, and they lack the mapping facilities available on the Hero class. The only reason we’re making them is for their tactical utility. They aren’t strategic.”

Ivan nodded. She was right. The Scouts could go out a few miles, spot the enemy, and let the commander in the field know where they were. And they could land and take off in short little hidden places, while the Hero class needed more space, and apparently more fuel as well.

“I’m afraid the mapping is going to have to wait a few months until we have more of the Heroes in the sky.”

Finally, Gregory Petrov knocked on the door and told them that the Tina was fully fueled. His bright red face testified to the weather. It was 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but their discussion in the train car had been held in comfort.

Ivan was thankful for the cold. The train was much less likely to sink into ice than mud.

The Tina would be in Alty-Kuduk in half an hour. It would take the train the rest of the day.

Ivan had his radio team report back to Ufa through the radio network.


Ufa Kremlin

October 24, 1637

Czar Mikhail took the memo, read it quickly, and passed it to his wife, who read it, grinned, and said, “I told you she was a pilot.”

Mikhail snorted, and waved for the boffin from the Dacha to continue.

“This is the new radio system, Your Majesty.”

It was set out on a table in several metal boxes with leather padding glued onto the corners. He pointed to the first box. “This is the transmitter receiver. It uses three tubes for tuning and signal amplification. We’ve had the design for years, and were just waiting for the tubes.” He pointed to the next box. “This is the aqualator. It converts text into binary code for transmittal and sends the binary to the transmitter in blocks. The receiving station uses its own aqualator to run a check sum and inform the sending unit if a block has to be resent.”

“How big are the blocks?” Evdokia asked.

“One K, that is one kilobyte, eight thousand bits held on the magnetic disk.” He pointed to the aqualator which included a steel disk and a read-write head, none of which required complex electronics. Though the electromagnet of the read-write head did require the craftsman who made it to be working through a powerful magnifying glass and using gold thread thinner than a human hair. Then he pointed at the radio box. “Which takes the radio about three seconds to send. We considered using smaller blocks, but we are hoping for better signal strength as time goes on, and the aqualator can output or read at a kilobyte a second now. It’s signal degradation in the radio transmission that is the problem.”

Evdokia nodded and he went on. “This is the basic antenna. We adjust this for each installation. But this is the field expedient system and it’s essentially just a long wire. On an airplane we build the antenna into the wings, and in a station we usually build an antenna tower and put a directional antenna up to increase the range. We can send the signal at sixty miles over flat land and thirty-five over hill country.

“Then we have the power supply, lead acid batteries and some sort of a generator. For field stations like this one, we use a pedal-powered generator. Permanent stations, we use a steam engine. Right now, we’re using reciprocating steam engines, but we would like to switch over to steam turbines after what we’ve learned making the turbines for the Hero-class aircraft engines. They are a simpler system.”

It was clear from the boffin’s tone that he thought they never should have made reciprocating steam engines at all.

He was probably correct. Even here in Russia, it was amazing how much they copied the mistakes of the up-timers. “The up-timers used reciprocating steam engines first, so that must be the simplest way to do it.” It was a common problem, more common in the USE than in Russia. Either Russia.

“In the aircraft; that’s the Princess Anna in Hidden Valley, and the new heavier-than-air aircraft; we build the antenna into the structure of the vehicle and make them directional, so that you can adjust the signal strength by turning the aircraft. This allows the aircraft to point at the signal in flight and take a compass heading, so that they can use radio stations to get their bearings and calculate their location. It’s not as accurate as we would like, but it does work.”

The briefing went on and much of it was stuff that they already knew. This system hadn’t burst full grown from Zeus’ head, or even the library at Grantville. Instead, it had been developed gradually over time, partly in the original Dacha outside Moscow, partly in Grantville, and partly here in the Ufa Dacha. A lot of the how-to had come from Grantville, but actually implementing it was the work of the scholars and craftsmen of the Russian Dachas, who were becoming an increasingly influential class within Russian society.


Ufa Dacha

October 24, 1637

“Okay, Yuri, let’s run it.”

Yuri pushed the button and the punch cards started feeding into the punch card reader. Each punch card represented a single line of code. And they were feeding the program into a set of aqualators, which, taken all together, had almost as much power as a laptop from the 1980s.

Of course, they couldn’t be taken all together. They didn’t run fast enough to be integrated into a single computer, so the program had to be designed to operate on several distinct aqualators. Each aqualator did the calculations for one part of the program, then fed the data to a different aqualator, which combined the results with others, set new parameters, and then fed that data back to the start to run the whole thing again.

Twenty minutes later, the run finished and the bank of aqualators spit out a weather prediction for this part of the world. The prediction wasn’t going to be great by up-timer standards, but that was only partly the fault of the primitive computing system and the still-learning programmers and meteorologists. Mostly it was due to the fact that they didn’t have enough weather stations. By now most of the stationary radio telegraphs had weather-measuring equipment too, and reported readings at dawn, noon, and dusk. And a lot of them at midnight, if they had someone covering the night shift, but that was still a tiny fraction of the weather reporting they’d had up-time, and there were no satellites in orbit. Still, what they would be reporting on the Ufa broadcast tonight was much better than anyone had ever had before. When you had planes in the air, you needed accurate weather predictions.


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