CHAPTER 9
Getting There
Shavgar approach
October 16, 1637
Brandy turned onto final approach and looked over at “General” Ivan Maslov. He wasn’t enjoying the flight. He was conscientiously using the navigational instruments and learning how to operate them. And he wasn’t frightened, but he wasn’t taking any joy in flying. That was what happened when you made a twenty-year-old kid into a general. “Relax, Ivan. We’re landing.”
“Yes, Princess,” Ivan said, never taking his eyes from the ground scope. The ground scope was a set of binoculars which were built into the plane and looked straight down, or down and to the front, at least when the plane was in level flight. They were used to measure height above ground, and ground speed. It took practice and math, and while Ivan had the math, he didn’t have the practice to do it well.
“We’re not in level flight; those instruments aren’t going to give accurate readings.”
“I know. I’m trying to determine if I can tell from the instruments that we’re not in level flight.”
“We have other instruments for that,” Brandy muttered. Most of her attention was now focused on their glide path. They were getting close now. She adjusted the flaps and brought the nose up a smidge to make the most of the ground effect as they came in. Then she shifted some steam to the fans for the ACLG, and a few seconds later they settled gently onto the river and started their taxi to shore.
✧ ✧ ✧
Vladimir was there to meet them. He kissed Brandy quickly, then said, “You need to get in the Scout. We just got a pony express rider from Almaty. The Zunghar are on the move. Erdeni Batur has apparently decided to take Almaty. And Salqam-Jangir Khan has decided to go to Almaty to take control, and we’re going to take him there. We’ll need the Scout, and the Nicky is going to be busy ferrying fuel to way points.
“I’ll be taking the Nicky as soon as it can be refueled.”
Ivan heard and asked, “Couldn’t you talk him out of it?”
“No, I couldn’t. And in political terms, he’s right. He needs to be there.”
“But in military terms, it’s exposing your king to protect a rook,” Ivan answered.
“The decision has been made and it’s above your pay grade, General. In fact, it’s above mine.”
Lake Kyzylkol
October 16, 1637
The lake was about one hundred thirty miles not quite due east of Shavgar, and it was surrounded by desert. There was grass in some places, but the lake itself was salty and there were salt flats around it. It was not, as it turned out, too salty for plants and other animals to live in. As he circled over it, Vladimir determined that it was just about perfect. The Nicky landed on the water, pulled up onto the shore, and the crew started unloading fuel while Vladimir went over his notes on the flight and the landmarks spotted. Two hours flight time here, an hour to unload, and two hours back. He could make two, maybe three, trips before sunset.
The crew was Vasilii, Miroslava and Ariq Ogedei. Ariq volunteered to stay here while Vladimir and the rest went back.
“I’ll set up the distillery and do some fishing,” Ariq said.
The distillery wasn’t the one they’d hauled. This one was made in Shavgar by local crafters. It consisted of a copper pot over a firebox with a copper tube coming out the top. The tube went down the side of the firebox to another container that was also filled with water. The tube coiled through the water in the second container while the steam cooled and condensed, then extended out of the water box to an empty pot that gradually filled with distilled water. The cooling box cooled the steam and at the same time warmed the water that went into the boiling pot. It wasn’t really complicated and it wasn’t super efficient, but there was a lot of grass, weeds and other burnables around here, even a fair amount of scrub wood. Plenty enough to turn the salty lake water into distilled water suitable for drinking.
✧ ✧ ✧
Back at Shavgar, Vladimir showed the coordinates to Brandy, and the markers to the khan’s officers, one of whom knew the place. Or thought he did. A caravan with food and supplies would leave tomorrow. Meanwhile, Brandy would follow him on the next trip, then scout east from there. The Scout had less range, but that was because it had a much smaller fuel tank. One load of fuel carried by the Nicky was ten tankfuls for the Scout. And for his next flights, Vlad would be flying with only Vasilii on board. The rest of the weight would be the extra fuel.
Brandy headed for the plane.
Taraz, Kazakh
October 16, 1637
Brandy circled the village. There were visible ruins where a larger town had once been. There were also fields and animals, horses and cattle, surrounding the town, and the river which, according to the other scout, was called the Talas River. People were coming out of the town and staring, and Brandy decided that the better part of valor in this case was to go back and get the Nicky and Salqam-Jangir Khan before landing among strangers.
She made note of landmarks and headed back to Lake Kyzylkol.
Shavgar
October 17, 1637
The Nicky was full of fuel, Salqam-Jangir Khan, Sultan Togym, two men at arms and supplies that would go to Lake Kyzylkol or on to Taraz and points east. The Nicky was starting a busy day.
From Shavgar to Lake Kyzylkol to top up, then on to Taraz, where he would drop off Salqam-Jangir Khan, Sultan Togym, the two men at arms and supplies, then back directly to Shavgar for another load of fuel. Straight back to Taraz to unload, back to Shavgar for more fuel, and so on all day long. Shavgar to Taraz was a straight shot, two hundred forty-two miles. With a stop at Lake Kyzylkol, it was two hundred forty-five. Not much difference, only three miles, though it did take extra fuel to land and take off again. But the Nicky was proving herself thirsty. She was drinking thirty gallons an hour. That was around one hundred ninety pounds of fuel per hour of flight, and Shavgar to Taraz was four hours. And with just Vlad and Vasilii on board, the Nicky could only carry two tons or four thousand pounds of fuel or twenty-one hours’ worth.
If the maps were right, Almaty was another three hundred miles or so. Though by now Vladimir’s faith in up-time maps of places in Kazakh was being greatly revised. The up-time maps from Grantville didn’t show the town of Taraz, and Taraz was a good twenty miles south of where they’d thought it would be.
Finally Station
October 21, 1637
Brandy circled, then landed on the creek. It wasn’t near being a river, but there was water, and there was a flattish piece of land. No one was here, and it had no name. And it had taken three days of recon flights to find it. So Brandy named it “Finally.” They were flying over the northern edge of the Tian Shan Mountains and there was a dearth of what Brandy considered good landing sites. Not that there weren’t places to land. Both the Scout and the Nicky were quite flexible when it came to landing. All they needed was someplace flattish. But for a station, a depot, water was also necessary and there wasn’t a lot of water locally. Nor an overabundance of flat spots. Finally Station was about ninety miles east of Taraz and it would do. Barely.
The only good news was that while she’d been searching high and low for some place to land, Vlad had been shifting fuel to Taraz.
Pishpek
October 22, 1637
Brandy circled the collection of small buildings, then flew to the Chu River nearby. They could use it as a landing area, but it would be a bit tight for the Nicky, which had a wider wingspan. They were getting close, if the Grantville maps were accurate, around a hundred miles from Almaty.
✧ ✧ ✧
Salqam-Jangir Khan arrived on one of the later flights and was consulting with the scouts. Salqam-Jangir Khan was trying to determine where they actually were according to the up-timer maps, while Brandy and Miroslava looked on. The issue was that, to a great extent, the up-timer maps of this part of central Asia were evidently blank. Not so much “here there be dragons” as “here there be nothing much worth noticing.” There were mountains. The maps sort of showed that, but the sort of long, brown blob on the map labeled “Tian Shan Mountains” didn’t even begin to describe the beautiful vistas that Brandy had spent the last several days flying over. They were near the northern edge of the Tian Shan, but not that near it and they weren’t all that sure just how far south of Almaty they were. They were pretty sure they were south of it.
“Go to Issyk-Kul,” Miroslava said.
“What?”
“Why?”
“It’s out of the way.”
Issyk-Kul was an inland mountain lake that was one of the largest inland bodies of water by volume in the world, because it was deep. But it was pretty big even in terms of surface area. It had to be, or the map wouldn’t show it.
The map was from “the atlas.” Which had been made in Grantville based on some half a dozen atlases that had come back through the Ring of Fire. The truth was that the mapmakers in America up-time just hadn’t cared all that much about this part of the world.
But, Brandy realized, Miroslava was right. “It’s big,” she said. “All we have to do is get some altitude and head east and we’ll see it.”
“Use the Nicky, not the Scout,” Miroslava said.
“Why not use the Scout?” Brandy asked.
“Carburetion,” Miroslava said as though that explained everything.
Brandy looked at Miroslava in confusion, which made her no different from Salqam-Jangir Khan or the two scouts. But Miroslava was looking at Brandy like she should understand. “What about carburetion?” Brandy asked, wondering if dealing with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock was this irritating.
“Air pressure decreases with altitu—”
“Got it!” Brandy said, realizing that as planes got higher not only did it get harder for the people in them to breathe, it also got harder for the engines to breathe. As the air pressure decreased, you got more gas and less air to the cylinders, and that decreased engine efficiency. You could sort of compensate by adjusting the carburetor settings if you could do that while in flight, which you couldn’t. “But the same thing would . . . Wouldn’t it?”
“No.”
“Why not?” It’s like pulling teeth, Brandy thought.
“Steam planes don’t have carburetors,” Miroslava said, and it was true. A steam plane had a nozzle that sprayed a fine mist of gasoline or fuel oil into the combustion chamber which was open to the air, and after the initial spark, it was a continuous flame that could be adjusted by adding more or less fuel into the chamber. Even if you turned off the fire entirely, the steam engines would continue to work for a while as the steam already in the system was used. There was plenty of oxygen to burn at altitudes greater than a human could survive.
“I wonder how high you could take a steam plane?” Brandy asked.
“According to Vasilii, higher than a human could survive, even using oxygen,” Miroslava said. Brandy realized that this wasn’t Miroslava’s weirdness. It was Vasilii’s. The pillow talk between those two has to be really outlandish. Murder and machines.
Meanwhile, Salqam-Jangir Khan and the scouts were still looking confused and the khan was starting to look irritated as well. “Ah. Miroslava’s right,” Brandy offered.
“She usually is,” Salaam-Jangir Khan said with a sort of half smile. “But there is usually Vasilii to explain what she’s talking about, and he’s not here now, so would you like to give it a try?”
“Internal combustion engines have a ceiling . . . ” Brandy trailed off at the blank looks, and got just a touch of what it felt like from Miroslava’s end. It wasn’t that Brandy was smarter than the khan. There was a reason that his people were already starting to call him “the Great.” He was a smart young man. It was just that she was looking at the world from such a different place that it could be hard to describe. “When you climb a mountain, it can be hard to breathe. The same thing happens to an internal combustion engine. If you fly high enough, the engine stutters and dies. But external combustion works differently, and will keep working even as you go higher. That means that the Nicky has a higher ceiling, can fly higher than the Scout.”
“How high?” Salqam-Jangir Khan asked.
“High enough to cause hypoxia,” Brandy said without any doubt at all. “High enough so that the passengers would suffocate while the engine was still working.”
“Well, let’s not fly it that high,” Salqam-Jangir Khan said with another of those half smiles.
One of the scouts said something in Kazakh that Brandy didn’t understand, and from his expression, she felt that was probably best.
Issyk-Kul
October 23, 1637
The Nicky was at fifteen thousand feet and Vladimir was afraid that that was too high. The ceiling that Hal Smith back in Grantville recommended was ten thousand feet above sea level. So, at around three miles high, Vlad and Vasilii were well into the range where supplemental oxygen was recommended. But they didn’t have supplemental oxygen.
So far, everything felt fine. But, again according to Hal and his son Farrell Smith, that didn’t mean much. People suffering from hypoxia often felt great, even while their mental abilities were so degraded that they couldn’t sign their name.
Given that, they’d worked out a plan. They’d flown at three thousand feet for half an hour, then gone up, not quite as fast as they could, but close to it. Now they were leveled out and looking around. And, at a guess, thirty or forty miles to the southeast was what just about had to be Issyk-Kul. It was huge.
“Vasilii, get us a bearing.”
“I am. The good news about hypoxia is it generally takes it a while. Yaw us right.”
Vlad snorted, then said, “Slew turn to the right.”
“Almost,” Vasilii said, then, “There.” Then he looked at the compass and made a notation.
Twenty minutes later, they landed in a small bay on the north shore of the Issyk-Kul. It was beautiful, with the mountains to the north and the huge lake to the south. But where they were was desert. Sand and the sort of desert shrubbery you would expect, and it was flat as well.
They settled on the beach and spent an hour making a careful survey of the surrounding peaks and prominent terrain features. While relatively flat on the shore of Issyk-Kul, they were surrounded on three sides by hilly terrain. The Tian Shan Mountains were beautiful and lush. A couple of hundred years ago, this had been a major stop on the Silk Road, but as trade dried up the population moved elsewhere. But there were wild groves of apple trees as well as other fruit and nut trees. It was 76 degrees, with a breeze coming off the water.
It was a beautiful place and Vladimir was in no hurry to leave. Vladimir wrote on the location form: “Brandy’s Cove.”
Still, after they’d made their observations, they climbed aboard and started the fire in the boiler. Ten minutes later, with the steam up, Vlad fed steam to the fans and the ACLG inflated. Then, feeding steam to the props, Vlad took off from the beach, brought the compass to a heading of 290 degrees, and set off back to Pishpek.
Pishpek
October 23, 1637
By comparing the maps from Grantville and what they knew, they had a good vector and distance from Brandy’s Cove to Almaty, and while the straight-line distance from Brandy’s Cove to Almaty was only sixty-two miles, it was sixty-two miles over a mountain range. Even if the Zunghar knew where their airbase was located, it would take his army a week of hard travel to get there. And now that they knew with confidence where Brandy’s Cove and Almaty were relative to each other and Pishpek, they could see routes that didn’t require flying quite so high. There were routes between mountain peaks, after all.
“What I recommend, Salqam-Jangir Khan, is that we spend a few days moving fuel to Brandy’s Cove, and then start reconnaissance over Almaty,” Vladimir said.
Salaam-Jangir Khan looked at the map and slowly shook his head. “I know that you must be concerned with fuel and equipment. And I know that the Nicky is using more fuel than you expected. But we can’t wait. My people in Almaty are convinced that I am still back in Shavgar. Even killing horses by the score, I can’t be anywhere near Almaty yet. But we are. Yes, move the fuel and the pistols to Brandy’s Cove, and do all that is needful to prepare the place. But, in the meantime, today Brandy and I will take the Scout to Brandy’s Cove, refuel and then fly over Almaty and determine what the situation is there.”
The pistols were copies of the Colt Dragoon caplock revolver and were for cavalry use. The AK4.7 rifle had excellent range and relative to a muzzle-loading rifled musket, a tremendous rate of fire. But it was big and heavy, and even the carbine version, the AK4.9, was heavy and hard to use effectively from horseback. The Colt Dragoon, however, could be fired readily one-handed, fired six shots about as fast as you could pull the trigger, and was, in general, a much better weapon. However, they had made changes even here. The revolvers had the loading lever of the Dragoon, but they were also designed to allow the quick removal and replacement of a loaded cylinder, meaning that by switching out the cylinder, they could fire six more shots, assuming the gun didn’t hang up or get clogged with powder residue.
But the big reason that they were carrying pistols, not AKs, was simply that they were smaller and lighter, so the Nicky could carry more of them.
“Salqam-Jangir Khan,” Vladimir started.
But the khan held up his hand, and looked not at Vladimir, but at Brandy. “Will you carry me to Almaty, Brandy? In spite of your husband’s fears.”
“Yes, Salqam-Jangir Khan.”