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CHAPTER 4

The Volga States


Conference room, Ufa Kremlin

September 1, 1637

Czarina Evdokia smiled as the two scouts were shown in. The room was two doors down from the war room, but this room was finished. It had a long table with chairs on rollers and a hardwood floor polished to a high gloss. There was a tea service against one wall and electric lights in sconces along the walls. “How did you like your first flight, Yury? And you, Ariq?” She waved them to chairs.

Yury smiled at the memory, and both men relaxed. Which Mikhail knew was what his wife intended. Men like Ariq Ogedei and Yury Arsenyev weren’t comfortable in the presence of royalty, and that either made them too diffident or it made them bluster. Evdokia was getting very good at putting people at their ease.

“They both did fine, and the Nicky’s repairs are complete,” Brandy said.

“Good,” Mikhail said. “Now, Yury, tell me about the Zunghars and Erdeni Batur, this new leader of theirs?”

“I think the first thing to note is he is a new leader, and his ancestry isn’t from Genghis Khan, so his hold on the tribes is weak. Not that he’s weak. He’s a hard man and driven, but there are several factions that think that if the four tribes are to be joined, they ought to be joined by a descendant of Genghis Khan. They don’t like him restricting them, and the only reason he’s been able to keep power is because they hate each other more than they hate him.” He shrugged. “Well, they also know that if they break apart, all the old blood feuds will resurface.” Yury stopped and considered a minute. “Finally, they’re afraid of him. He’s proven that he’s willing to use torture and to kill whole families. You must understand. The difference between fear and respect in a barbarian is thinner than a single hair.” Another pause. “I know. Ariq here is a barbarian.”

Ariq started to make a rude gesture, then looked at the women in the room and restrained himself.

“It’s not unique to barbarians. A number of people get the two confused,” Evdokia said. “All too many see kindness as weakness.”

“It’s because they are cruel by nature and are only kind when they are afraid not to be,” Ariq said. “But not all men”—he blushed—“not all people are made that way.” He gave the czar and czarina a seated bow.


Ufa river bank

September 3, 1637

By this time, the Nastas’ya Nikulichna was repaired and the new valves were installed. The new skirt for the air cushion was attached and the steam was up. The steam system of the Hero class wasn’t fast. It took up to fifteen minutes to get the steam up to workable levels, and this time it had taken longer because Vasilii was checking all the controls twice. He turned on the steam to each engine individually, and had Vladimir bring up that engine to full power, then turned off the steam and saw how long it took for the line’s pressure to drop. Not long, as it turned out. Finally, they were ready and Vasilii gave Vladimir the thumbs-up.

Vlad fed enough power into the fans to inflate the skirt to about half full. That reduced the friction on the air cushion landing gear a little, but not much. Just enough so that you could feel the balance of the engines as you brought them up. At this pressure on land, even all the engines on full would barely move the Nicky. He brought up and balanced the engines. In theory, they should be perfectly balanced. But, in fact, that never happened. That was part of the reason why each engine had its own throttle.

Vlad spent a few seconds feeling the way the plane shifted under the force of the engines. Then, once everything was as balanced as he could make it, he fed more steam to the fans feeding the air cushion, and the plane began to move for real. More power, and it was like they were on flat ice. Then, like they were already in the air. The speed came up fast, and as soon as it hit sixty miles per hour, he pulled back on the stick and they were flying. He brought the stick back to neutral, which left them at a twenty percent up-angle and they gained altitude fast. He cut the steam to the ACLG and turned on the motor that tightened the straps, pulling the air cushion up tight against the body. Then he opened the rear release and gave a bit of steam to the fans so that there would be a continuous airflow over the condenser.

He kept them at 20 degrees until they had reached a thousand feet, then pushed the stick forward a little so that they slowly dropped to 10 degrees up-angle and their airspeed picked up.

“You ready?” Vasilii asked Vlad.

“Not yet. Let me get us up another couple of thousand feet. And I want to be heading back toward the river before you screw things up.”

“Okay.”

Vlad took them through a rising turn until they were at four thousand feet above the ground and facing back toward the city of Ufa. Then he said, “Go ahead.”

Vasilii pushed a lever, and cut off steam to the right outboard engine. What Vlad noticed was that the other three engines picked up a little. He feathered the right outboard even though it was already effectively feathered by Vasilii and fed more power to the right inboard. Cruising speed was sixty-five to seventy-percent power to the props. With one prop down, he was up at ninety-plus-percent power to the right inboard, and he was still in a slow right turn, and his right wing was dropping. He used the pedals to shift his rudders to the left to counter the drift, and that stopped the dropping of the right wing. But he had to use the wheel to move the plane back to even bubble. Even a small plane is slow to react compared to an automobile, and while a plane like this one was faster to react than an airship, it was slower than most planes. Flying a plane was about thought, not reflexes. Vladimir realized that that was the real pilot error when the Nicky had crashed. He’d panicked and let reflexes take over from thought. That was deadly in the air.

They repeated the process with all the engines, each individually, and even two engines at a time, both right and both left. With two engines off, especially two of them on the same wing, they were going down, but not necessarily crashing. By putting the rudder all the way over and lifting the dead wing, he was able to turn the spiral into a curve wide enough so that they could decide where they were going to come down. He could also control the other system so it was a safe bet everyone would walk away from the plane. It was even likely that once the two dead engines were fixed, they would be ready to fly again.

✧ ✧ ✧

They were back down on the side of the Ufa River. Czar Mikhail looked to Vasilii and said, “Well?”

Vasilii grimaced, then said, “I’d like more time, but I saw the latest radio messages. Salqam-Jangir Khan is riding hell-for-leather east, along with about half the state legislature, and he needs us there now.”

The czar looked at Vladimir. “Load it up then. I’ve made a couple of changes. Brandy is going to fly one of the Scouts in formation with you, and I’ve sent the Princess Anna ahead to the Aral Sea with a load of fuel. Gasoline for the Scout, mostly.”

While the steam planes could use heating oil as their fuel, the radial engines of the Scouts weren’t so flexible. They needed gasoline with enough alcohol in it to have a high octane number, or else the spark plugs fouled or burned out.

Meanwhile, Miroslava, Ariq, and Ivan Maslov came aboard, followed by a bunch of gear that was stowed. Yury would be going with Brandy and getting flying lessons.

There was a set of replacement panels for the skirt. Since the skirt was designed to leak air anyway, it was made in pieces about a foot long that had holes in them so that they could be easily sewn into gaps where a piece had torn. They had enough to replace the whole skirt, but since the skirt could be expected to wear out first in the back, what would actually happen would be that they would have enough replacement skirt segments to replace the trailing edge about three times. After that, they would have to have new skirt segments made locally.

They were also taking a deaerator with them to deaerate lake or river water because any dissolved gasses in the water would, over time, damage the boiler, engines, and condenser.

A plane designed to carry sixteen people including crew would be carrying five and still be the next thing to overloaded because of all the gear they were taking.

✧ ✧ ✧

With the steam still up, they topped up the fuel tanks. And they were off. The Scout’s max cruising speed was about seventy miles per hour, so the Nicky was cruising at less than her best speed. To maintain formation, they brought the angle of attack up a little, and decreased the steam to the engines. They made it about two hundred fifty miles down the Yaik River.

At this time, the location that Vladimir thought was marked as Orsk in a world atlas from Grantville was occupied by a fishing village of the Yaik Cossacks. They landed on the river, which was a job because the river had trees on both sides. It was also not navigable by a riverboat, and probably would have killed them if they’d had pontoon landing gear, because there were clumps of grass and land that stuck out of the river here and there, but the ACLG flowed right over them. They pulled up to the bank and then Brandy landed the Scout and, using gas cans, they refueled.

While they were refueling, a small delegation from the village arrived and asked them if they were from Ufa. They spoke a local patois that was a mix of Russian and Kazakh, but they were surprisingly well informed about what was going on in the wider world. They had fish to sell and everyone had lunch together. They also asked about what the plane would need in the way of landing facilities. The rail line was supposed to pass about forty miles west, where the land was flatter and less forested, which the local village leader felt was an unfortunate choice.

“You t’ink can arrange radio here?” the headman asked. The man was clearly bright, but the village was isolated and the language had shifted a lot.

“I will ask,” Vladimir said, and he would. But he didn’t think it likely that there would be a radio in the next few years. There were too many other places that had priority, and tubes were still in short supply.

After lunch and getting the steam back up, they took off again. From Orsk to Alty-Kuduk was three hundred and fifty miles, which the Nicky could manage, but the Scout plane couldn’t, so when Brandy started getting low on fuel, they found a bit of savanna and landed so they could refuel the Scout’s tanks.

The last leg was short, just over a hundred miles, and they landed at Alty-Kuduk while the sun was still up.


Alty-Kuduk

September 3, 1637

The bay had made an excellent landing field for the Nicky and the Scout. The Princess Anna was already there, and had unloaded gasoline, which the Scout required. The Nicky could drink gasoline, but it preferred fuel oil.

The next morning, having been unloaded, the Nicky flew back to Ufa for another load of fuel. It was a stopgap. A large load of fuel was on its way to Alty-Kuduk by wagon, and General Tim was organizing a steam train carrying two tanker wagons full of gasoline and fuel oil. The train would also bring a steam engine and boiler to go into one of the riverboats that would take the fuel oil up the Syr Darya River to Shavgar.

Their problem was they were trying to drive to the east end of Kazakh without a road or a gas station. So the whole thing was improvisation.

Because of that, over the next five days, both the Nicky and the Princess Anna flew back and forth to Ufa, ferrying fuel to Alty-Kuduk, with the Nicky making stops at the village on the Yaik River to set up a fuel depot, which, if they maintained it properly, might get the village a radio after all.


Ufa docks

September 3, 1637

There was a brisk morning breeze as Bernie and Natasha walked up the ramp from the dock to the steamboat Ilya Muromets and were saluted by the new captain, Leonid Belyaed. “Welcome aboard, ma’am, sir. Your room is ready.”

He was in a blue coat with brass buttons and epaulets. That was partly because he was of the service nobility, and partly because there were now two cloth factories in Ufa and three in Kazan, and the cost of cloth was about a third of what it had been in 1632. He was also wearing a billed hat, which was apparently copied from the one the ladies of Kazan had had made for General Tim’s uniform.

Leonid hadn’t gone overboard with the embroidery, though. Just a bit around the front edge. Bernie neither smiled nor commented while they were turned over to a fresh-faced ensign to be shown to their room.

In their room, with the door closed, Bernie pointed at his head and laughed.

Natasha hit him in the shoulder. “It’s not his fault.”

“It’s not Tim’s, either. It’s Ivan’s, and it’s going to bite him on the backside too. Tim has seen to it. Along with his brevet comes a new uniform and Tim has had special headgear designed for it.”

The Ilya Muromets had a generator and batteries to power the radio, and since it had the electricity anyway, it was wired for an intercom and an in-ship phone system. The phone rang and Bernie looked around and saw the headset. He picked it up. “Yes?”

“We’re ready to cast off, sir,” said a voice Bernie didn’t recognize.

Bernie wasn’t at all sure why he was getting a call. “Very well,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

“Thank you, sir,” said the voice and hung up. Less than a minute later they felt the riverboat pulling away from the dock. They were on the way.

Ufa was located on a spit of land between two rivers. One side had the Ufa River, the other the Belaya River. The Ufa flowed into the Belaya, which flowed into the Kama, a couple of hundred miles downriver. The Kama flowed another couple of hundred miles to the Volga, and flowed into it about fifty miles downriver of Kazan. It wouldn’t be until they were going down the Volga toward the Caspian Sea that their real mission would start.

That would have made this a really long trip if they were going by horse and wagon. For that matter, it would be a really long trip even if they were going by unpowered river barge. But they were on a steam-powered gunboat with a cruising speed of ten knots. Also, the whole trip was downriver, so that added the current of the rivers to their speed. The Volga was big, but not particularly fast flowing, so their average speed downriver was going to be around fifteen knots per hour, but they would be traveling all day, every day, with only occasional stops to refuel and re-water. The steamboats didn’t bother with condensers. They filtered the river water and deaerated sometimes. That probably cut the fuel efficiency of their boilers and engines by half, but it was a great deal cheaper in initial cost.

For the next two days, including around ten hours docked and refueling, Bernie and Natasha had a mini-vacation, mostly undisturbed except for phone calls from the bridge, where the captain seemed intent that they be informed of every action the riverboat took.

Then they arrived at Samara.


Samara docks

September 5, 1637

The town of Samara was booming. It was one day from Kazan by riverboat and the escaping serfs that were less trusting of Czar Mikhail had run here. Not all of them, but enough to double the town’s size in less than a year. There was construction everywhere.

They were met by Timofey Ivanovich Razin, the newly elected mayor of Samara. Timofey was around thirty-five and had brought his family east. He was a Cossack with a captured Turkish wife, and a man on the make. Samara had no radio, and it was far enough from the network so that to be tied in they would either need more radio stations or Samara would need a tubed radio. Bernie managed, barely, to keep from slapping his forehead. Why don’t we have a broadcast station in Ufa? Bernie went through the rest of the greetings and first discussions in something not quite a daze. Samara generally liked the new constitution, but . . . 

They wanted assurance that the supreme court wouldn’t find that they were required to return escaped slaves. And they also wanted exceptions to the interstate trade clause. States couldn’t “impede” trade with other states. And the court in Ufa had already, in almost its first decision, determined that “impede” meant “tax.” The court’s opinion had been occasioned by a cattle drive up from Kazakh. As a test, Togym had demanded a ten-percent tax on the sale price of the beef. The court, with Czar Mikhail sitting in, had determined that Kazakh couldn’t tax goods sent to the rest of the Sovereign States, and Ufa and the rest of the Sovereign States couldn’t tax goods sent to Kazakh.

Timofey Ivanovich Razin thought that was fine for Kazakh, but not for Samara, whose major value was as a transshipment port. They needed the income from those boats. The right to tax goods moving through their state was folded in with the unwillingness to return escaped slaves as giving too much power to the federal government.

✧ ✧ ✧

Once they got back to their cabin on the Ilya Muromets, Bernie told Natasha about his realization.

“Bernie, we’ve been working on a broadcast station since Vladimir got here with the tubes. It’s not that easy. For one thing, the tubes my idiot brother brought weren’t the right tubes, and the alternator design used by the Catholic station proved much more difficult than we thought it was going to be. We abandoned that approach back in the first Dacha.”

“I remember, but we’re making our own tubes now!”

“Barely. And, as I just said, the tubes for a broadcast station are harder to do. They need a harder vacuum.” Natasha shook her head, then continued. “But we’re very close. Close enough so that we’ve set up a factory in Kazan to mass-produce tunable crystal sets.”

Bernie had to be satisfied with that.


Kazan

September 5, 1637

General Tim was back in Kazan and at a party, being buttonholed by a very odd committee of two: Father Kiril and a mullah. They were willing to accept freedom of religion when it came to established faiths of the book, Christianity, Islam, Judaism. They could even choke down Buddhism, because it had been around a very long time and if you squinted hard you could allow that it had “a book” of sorts.

But when it came to this new cult of “God’s Ring,” something had to be done. The Ringers were a group of people, some of whom had been to the Ring of Fire in person and, having found an actual unquestionable act of God, decided that Judaism, and therefore all the rest of the religions of the book, were nonsense. That if God wanted to make a point, he or she wouldn’t need to send one guy to Palestine or even part the Red Sea temporarily. He would do a Ring of Fire, something that couldn’t be argued with and left visible and obvious traces. Not even “traces” but cliffs hundreds of feet high!

They then proceeded to insist that they had figured out what God meant by the Ring of Fire. Which wasn’t all that different from what the people of the book said, except they wanted the saved to give their money to them, not the Christians, Muslims, or Jews. And certainly not the Buddhists, who didn’t have a clue about anything.

There were dozens of Ring of Fire sects by now. The one that Father Kiril and his unlikely ally were incensed about had come to Russia by way of Poland, and, while not violent, took the view that freedom of religion only made sense on the premise that all the religions before theirs were false and therefore it didn’t matter which one you wasted your time on. But all religions were now superseded by the Ring of Fire, which was clearly God’s true message—His own message, literally carved in stone—so the doctrine of freedom of religion was seriously in doubt.

“Gentlemen, I don’t disagree,” Tim told the clerics. “But, when it comes to freedom of religion, the court has decided it does include the out-and-out pagans of the steppes, so presumably it includes the Ringers as well. And that means if a mob incensed by an injudicious sermon attacks them, I’m going to have to react. That could include bloodshed, which none of us want, I’m sure.”

Every time Tim turned around, he was having to play politics. The Muscovites were suppressing the Ringers with a vengeance. So were the Ottomans and the Safavids. The Poles weren’t, though; being, as always, slackers when it came to faith. And while the Ringers existed in the USE, they were less common because there were a lot of actual up-timers in the USE, including priests and pastors who were happy to debunk the Ringers with the comment, “I was there. I was the one God moved.” And some variant of “I don’t know what it means” and “It doesn’t mean what that lying creep says.” But the farther you got from the Ring of Fire, the more people were starting new religions based on it.

Kazan was pretty far from the Ring of Fire.

“Can’t you at least talk to Bernie Zeppi, Brandy Bates, or Tami Simmons? Get them to—” the mullah started.

“Not Bernie Zeppi,” Kiril said. “He’s as likely to disrespect our faiths as the Ringers.”

“In all honesty, I don’t know what Princess Brandy or Tami Simmons believe. But Father Kiril is correct. Bernie will almost certainly say ‘Let them go to hell or heaven in their own way. It’s none of your business.’”

“The saving of souls is my business,” Father Kiril insisted. The mullah nodded in firm agreement.

Thankfully then, an aide came up and interrupted. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. Duty calls.”

“Thank you for rescuing me, Goram. But you could have done it ten minutes ago,” Tim said.

“We have a message from double oh three, sir,” Goram said quietly.

Tim didn’t jerk, but he almost hissed, “Not here.” 003 was one of a few military agents that Tim had in Birkin’s camp. It was an in-joke and a cover at the same time. Their names were never mentioned. 003 was on Birkin’s staff and mostly trusted, but a great deal of what Birkin did these days was compartmentalized. For one thing, Birkin was suffering regular defections, as things in Muscovite Russia got less stable.

Both sides were being forced to learn about operational security.

Not all the defectors were real.

In another room, Tim asked, “What does Three have to say?”

“Birkin has new orders from Moscow. He is to leave a blocking force here and move the army overland.”

“Overland where?”

“That’s the part that no one knows. One rumor is that he’s to take Solikamsk as the first step in taking the Babinov Road and hitting Shein in Tobolsk.”

Tim snorted. “I almost wish it was that.”

Goram didn’t say anything, but his expression was questioning.

“It would pull them out of position,” Tim explained. “And convince those jackasses in Solikamsk that they need to join the Sovereign States if the Muscovites aren’t going to eat them.” Tim called up in his mind a map of the Sovereign States that included Muscovite Russia. “We could use armored riverboats to bypass them and take the Volga all the way to Bor before the winter freeze. We might even get lucky and take Nizhny Novgorod. That would quite possibly end the war.”

“But you don’t think they actually would.”

“If Birkin were in charge, not a chance,” Tim said. “He’s good. They both are.” Tim was talking about General Ivan Birkin and his cousin and second-in-command, Iakov Birkin. They’d had some expensive lessons last winter, but they’d both learned from them. Learned altogether too well. “But, of course, they aren’t in charge. Who are the orders from?”

“Deputy Director-General Ivan Romanov.”

It would be nice to say that Ivan Romanov was the epitome of the flaws in the Russian rank-by-family system that was so much the bane of the Russian army, but it wasn’t really true. What he was was ambitious, and completely untrustworthy. He would—and had—betrayed the nation and family in search of his own profit and aggrandizement. It was apparent that Ivan Romanov thought he should have been czar, not his nephew. But he’d never been in a position to seize the crown. There had always been someone in the way.

Not anymore, apparently. With Sheremetev missing, Ivan was in effective control of Muscovite Russia. And apparently doing a good job of holding the boyars in check.

So there were Romanovs in charge in both parts of Russia now, and it could be that Russia was setting up for its own version of the War of the Roses. None of which told Tim what Ivan Romanov was planning.


Moscow Kremlin

September 5, 1637

Ivan Romanov thought he was probably going to be crowned czar of Russia sometime in the next few months, and that prospect was bringing him less joy than he had expected. His son Nikita was on the family estates and his idiot nephew was proving that he was less idiot and more cowardly than Ivan had realized. He was afraid of power, Mikhail was. And the damned up-timers had shown him a way to abandon the power of the czardom without having his head removed, so he’d jumped at it.

But Russia wasn’t the sort of nation that could survive democracy. The Russian character was too strong. It needed a strong man to rein it in, or it would run wild. Democracy might work in Germany or that mythical America, but never in Russia. Ivan knew that and so had Sheremetev, but Sheremetev lacked something. Something essential to being a czar. He lacked legitimacy. That was why Ivan Romanov was probably going to be forced to take the crown by an increasingly desperate Boyar Duma.

Meanwhile, smuggling between Russia and the Sovereign States was constant. Copper, silver, and gold, as well as furs and, increasingly, beef and mutton were flowing into Russia from the Sovereign States, and iron, steam engine boilers, chemicals, generators, and all the things that were now being manufactured in Russia were flowing out east to the Sovereign States.

Which was actually helping the Russian economy. His minister of finance had shown him the numbers. Almost, Ivan would have been willing to let Mikhail have the Sovereign States for a few years until it collapsed from its inconsistencies and internal conflicts. Almost. But that couldn’t happen. Every day the United Sovereign States of Russia existed, Russia got weaker. Politically, if not economically. Serfs and slaves were still running east, especially southeast, and the Cossacks were leaning more and more in Mikhail’s direction. Without the Cossacks, Russia had much less protection against the Turks and Tatars.

He went to the cabinet and pulled out the map. The very secret map of the next campaign. It would go into effect as soon as the rivers froze solidly enough to take the steamboats out of service. The army investing Kazan would leave a blocking force, march north and east to Perm and take the city, then, using the Kama River as their road, they would march to Ufa and end this stupid war.


Tobolsk Kremlin

September 5, 1637

In a large log cabin pretending to be a castle, there was a room with log walls and a ceramic wood stove big enough to sleep on. The room had a table and kerosene lamps. In that room, Mikhail Borisovich Shein was looking at a map not dissimilar to the one Ivan Romanov was examining. It showed Perm and Solikamsk, Verkhoturye and Tobolsk, and Ufa. Little Ufa, which was now probably the second-largest city in Russia. It was bigger than Tobolsk by a wide margin, and Tobolsk was growing every day.

Ufa was the danger. Ufa and the United Sovereign States of Russia, not Muscovite Russia.

How did he do it? Shein wondered. He almost believed the nonsense about the up-timers enchanting Mikhail. Now, with the up-timer maps, there were more routes through the Ural Mountains than were known without them. Also, Ufa was sitting pretty much right on one of them, right on the Silk Road, which meant that just blocking the Babinov Road wouldn’t keep the Sovereign States’ army out of Siberia. Shein started the process of shifting more of his army south, away from the Babinov Road, to guard his southern border.

It was fall and the armies of Russia—all the Russias—were shifting in preparation for the winter campaign season.


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