by Eric Flint
"Good Lord, no," Brandy said. "It'd be our luck that the plumbing would back up!"
It wasn't as bad as Brandy feared, once they'd gotten rid of the soup. Inside another well-sealed but smaller jar, was the latest intelligence from the Dacha.
"Hm…" Vladimir murmured.
"Hm?" Vlad's "hm" was the type that sounded like good things were happening.
"Well, I've got a name," Vladimir said. "And Natasha has outlined a plan. But we can at least assure our creditors that the merchandise is on the way."
"That's good."
***
Pyotr Chudinov looked over his mule train then gave the signal and started the trip to Vitebsk. He carried on his mules several capacitors-whatever those were-and one Russian steam engine made at the Dacha. Also several letters to a Polish factor he was acquainted with. Pyotr hadn't asked, but from Vitebsk the capacitors would travel down the Daugava to Riga which would put them in Swedish territory. Since he had paid his bribes, his main concern at this point was bandits.
And a bit of concern that someone might pry a bit too closely into certain items that were headed to a certain town in Germany.
All in all, it would be a lot better for Pyotr and his family if no one noticed that. Not that Pyotr would be taking them all the way. He would pass them off to a Polish merchant and where they would go from there Pyotr had no official idea. Not that it was hard to guess. Considering that Princess Natalya was sending them and where her brother was.
The Dacha
"And how is Gustav Adolph different from Adolph Hitler, in the up-timer histories," Misha asked.
"He's Swedish, not German." Nikolai laughed.
"Hitler was… would have been… Austrian, not German. Gustav made himself Emperor of Germany the same way Hitler did in that other history, and is at war with a lot of the same people. France, England, and maybe next year, Poland.
"Which would be just fine with me." Nikolai wasn't laughing now. "Damn Poles! With their false Dimitrys, murder and looting. At least we taught them a lesson at Rzhev."
"And after that?" Misha asked. "How long before Gustav's Operation Barbarossa?"
"He's too canny for that. After all, the histories make it quite clear how it turned out."
"Yes, because Hitler was a lousy general and didn't understand Russian winters. Gustav is a very good general and does understand Russian winters. But that doesn't make him less ambitious than that crazy up-timer. Just more dangerous."
Bernie had been paying a bit more attention to politics since Anya's revelation. And he was having a lot of trouble making sense of it all. He appreciated that Gustav Adolph had ridden to the rescue of Grantville in the Croat raid, but he didn't approve of the USE having a king or the New US being reduced to just another state. It seemed like Mike Stearns had given up too much of what America had been up-time. Maybe he had no choice but that didn't make Bernie any more loyal to some Swedish king and his German prime minister. By now Bernie had more friends in Russia than in Grantville. It wasn't that Bernie had any great love for the government of Russia, especially now, but America was gone. Left up-time.
And the USE seemed just another down-time nation. its up-timer ideals increasingly diluted by those of the down-timers. From where Bernie was sitting, there wasn't that much difference between Czar Mikhail with Sheremetev and King Gustav with Wettin. At this point, Bernie just hoped that the kings, emperors and czars of the world didn't start a war that had up-timer fighting up-timer. He honestly didn't know what he would do if that happened.
Meanwhile he had work to do. The telephone systems they were working up for the Russian cities used telephone operators that switched the calls by hand, but they wanted an electromechanically switching system. The EMCM, Electro-Mechanical Calculating Machine already used solenoid switches for its memory and combinations of them to produce Nand and Nor gates so Bernie was having to look up Nand gates to figure out if they could be applied to the telephone switching system. After several hours Bernie found out that Nand was short for "not and" in Boolean algebra. He still didn't have a clue whether it could be used in a telephone switching system. But he sent the definition of a Nand gate, complete with the ones and zeros, to the phone guys. Then he went on to the next question someone wanted him to work on.
***
"Where are you headed, Tim?" Ivan Maslov asked, looking over Lieutenant Boris "Tim" Timofeyevich Lebedev's new uniform-complete with the new lieutenant's insignia with more than a touch of envy. Then he grinned. Tim was back in Moscow, a second lieutenant with considerable experience with latrines. Tim was still not as good as Ivan was at war games but was getting better.
Tim shuddered. "My uncle… he requires my report."
"But you did well at Rzhev! At least officially." Ivan didn't envy Tim his great uncle at all. He had met the old monster once and that was more than enough. But Tim's great uncle was, by good fortune, a supporter of the Sheremetev faction, which now controlled the Duma. Not one of the first supporters but he hadn't been purged, not even sent out of Moscow. General Shein, on the other hand, was now in charge of one section of the Siberian frontier, demoted and sent as far from Moscow as you could get and still be in Russia. From what Ivan had heard, General Shein had missed execution by a hair's breadth.
"My uncle is not limited to official channels," Tim said. "I'm to have a chat with him. Which translates to giving him a full report on everything that happened. It will take hours, I promise you. Hours! I won't be able to gloss over anything."
Ivan knew that Tim would much rather gloss over parts of what happened in Rzhev. More for Izmailov's sake than his own. Which was a pretty positive response to someone that had you cleaning out latrines.
***
Tim's great uncle was no one's fool and ten times as politically astute as Tim ever wanted to be. It had taken him all of a minute and a half to get through the fiction of the contingency plan. He had laughed at General Izmailov's notion of giving Tim a medal and then having him shot. A rough, cackling laugh, that seemed to come from the depths of hell. "A good plan," his uncle said when he finished laughing. "But he was wise not to carry it through. I would have regretted having a man of such wit put to death."
Tim waited. Silent. At attention.
"Well?" his uncle barked.
"Yes, sir. General Izmailov is a great general and a great asset to Russia."
"But a friend of Shein's, one of his proteges, in fact. Keep your distance from him, boy. Sheremetev's not fond of Shein. The war party didn't do well in this last shake up. I'll try to keep your general alive for you, but not to the point of risking the family. Now tell me about Khilkov. What went on? And why did Izmailov let him do it?"
Tim told him. It wasn't like General Izmailov had much choice, considering Khilkov's family connections. Then they went on to the situation in Rzhev and the Polish border in general.
"Rzhev was a screw up, sir," Tim said. "They didn't have the steam ships to take advantage of it, even if they had held the town. It really was magnates going off on their own."
"I don't doubt it, boy. That's what started Dimitryads. Poland uses its magnates to test the waters."
"Yes, sir. But they didn't have the logistic train to support it even if it had worked."
"You seem pretty sure of that, boy. The Poles are cavalry. They need their horses but can steal the rest."
Tim hesitated. He was in fact quite sure that cavalry would be trashed if it lacked infantry support and Russia controlled the rivers for troop transport. But his great uncle was a boyar of the Duma and ruled the family with an iron hand. "Not with us controlling the river with steam barges. War horses need grain, horseshoes, and so on. Cavalrymen need food and equipment-which breaks in the field-and gunpowder. They would do damage but with the steam barges to put troops in front of them and the walking walls and cannon… especially with the AK3s… they are going to run out of cavalry long before we run out of bullets. Over the course of an hour cavalry can outrun a steam barge, bu
t over a day they can't keep up. With the dirigible to locate them…" Tim shook his head. "They wouldn't last a week."
"Tell me about the flying ship."
"It told us where they were. Which was important in Rzhev, but would have been even more important if the Poles had tried to push farther in. It would have let us see where they were going and get there first. They would have been forced from one trap to another, until they were utterly destroyed. Cavalry is doing well to cover thirty miles a day; a dirigible can cover that in an hour. Then go home and tell the infantry and mobile artillery where the cavalry is headed. Cavalry's day is over except as support troops. If that." Which was a risky thing to say because his great uncle had been a cavalry commander under Ivan the Terrible.
All in all, it was a grueling interview and Tim was happy to get back to the Kremlin. Though Tim didn't know it, the interview had a strong effect on the policies of the Duma. Cavalry, which had always been the province of the service nobility, was downgraded in importance and so was the service nobility. Instead, the musketeer class with its rifle companies would be given more support and respect. It wouldn't happen in a year or even a decade, but between the destruction of Khilkov's cavalry and the many reports, both official and unofficial, the writing was on the wall. Eventually, because the service nobility was the class that produced the bureaucrats and the musketeer class was the class that produced the merchants, the private sector would gain-a bit at a time-the ear of the government and the public sector would be heeded a bit less. The years of limited mobility would not be allowed to lapse. With inflation, that would mean that more and more of the peasants would be able to pay off their debts to the lesser nobility and seek factory jobs.
Totally by accident and without ever knowing it, Tim had struck a blow for freedom. A small blow. Even a tiny one. But who knows? Enough such tiny blows and even the massive edifice of Russian serfdom might eventually fall.
***
"At last, at last!"
Brandy had to grin. Vlad's happy dance was a combination of many things, not least of which was some old football player's antics after a touchdown. Where he'd ever seen it was beyond her. One of the best things about the seventeenth century was the lack of football, as far as Brandy was concerned. Every fall she did her own happy dance about that.
"Does he do that always?" The speaker was an old Grantville hand in a way. Karl Paschkewicz was a merchant from Silesia who was in and out of Grantville three or four times a year.
Brandy looked Paschkewicz, a bit surprised. "No, not really. But we'd been pretty worried about this shipment."
"I hope he's as happy when he finds out how much fell off the wagon on the way here," Paschkewicz muttered, and Brandy looked at him and raised an eyebrow in inquiry. "Ah, I have a message for the prince."
"From?"
"Perhaps I should speak to Prince Vladimir?"
Brandy looked him, then shook her head sadly. "If you say so. Vlad. Business." The dance stopped at Brandy's tone. "The shipment is not complete and Herr Paschkewicz has a message which he feels he must deliver to you."
"Not complete? How incomplete?" Suddenly there was nothing at all comical about Vlad's stance.
However, Brandy had to suppress a smile at the merchant's sudden gulp.
"Ah… the shipment was unexpected, Your Highness. Preparations had not been made. It was necessary to grease some palms. And the contents of the shipment were the only, ah, grease we had."
"Whose palms?"
Brandy didn't recognize the names but it was clear that Vlad did. They were Polish nobility. They talked about who had gotten what and how much. The most important items were mica-based electronics. Which both Russia and the USE would prefer not to have fallen into Polish hands. They would go a long way to providing the Poles with tactical range radios. Of course, the way the Polish nobility worked the fact that some Polish nobles had radios didn't necessarily mean the Polish government had them. The best Vlad could come up with was a maybe. If Russia or the USE ended up at war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it might be that they would be facing radio-equipped forces… or it might not.
The letter, it turned out, was from Cass Lowry. How he had found out that the shipment was coming here neither Vlad or Brandy could make a guess at, but he had figured it out and used the information to insert a letter into the shipment. The letter included quite a bit of complaining about the way he was being treated since Sheremetev had taken over plus a few tidbits about the Russian arms program. There was now production of caps and a simple change in the design of the removable chambers of the AK3, combined with replacing the flint with a hammer attachment. These changes turned the AK3 flintlock into the AK4 caplock. And just about doubled the rate of fire for as long as you had loaded chambers. Cass also talked a bit about the eastern frontier of Russia and Brandy wondered if he was planning to resign without notice.
***
"We have very little choice, Papa," Pavel said. "Ten thousand AK3s to the Turks, due… very soon. The gun shops will be working like mad."
Boris nodded. Things were getting better… mostly. Not so much for the Bureau men as for Russia in general. Food and silver were arriving from the Ottoman Empire. Wheat was expensive in Moscow but not yet too expensive. Steam engines, rifles and lots of other things were going south in exchange. Boris was concerned about the rifles, but not that concerned. No. That wasn't quite right Boris was really worried about the rifles but selling them to the Ottoman Empire wasn't the issue. The AK3 was an incredibly simple weapon to make. Selling one to the Ottoman Empire or the Poles or anyone else was as bad as selling a million of them and there was no way that they could keep the Ottoman Empire or the Poles or the Swedes, for that matter, from getting hold of an example rifle. So they might as well sell as many as they could. At least they weren't selling the Ottomans the breach-loading cannon. Though Boris wasn't at all sure that would do any good.
"And so, certain boyars gain more silver and gold from the, ah, southern trade," Boris said. "But at least they haven't shorted the grain supply… much."
"And our people are prepared." Pavel smiled. Potatoes had become incredibly popular among the peasants. You could hide a plot of potatoes from the taxman, or at least hide how many there were. There was considerable upset among the Bureau men about the amount of farming equipment that was going south. But it was quiet, underground resentment. "Three of our people have paid off their debt and gone to work for the railroad."
"Signing loan from the railroad?" Boris asked and Pavel nodded. Even with the economy expanding and with inflation, enough rubles for a peasant to pay his way out of debt were hard to come by. So companies that had the money had started using signing loans to clear the peasant's debt, or, more accurately, transfer it to the company. Since the railroad was owned by the Sheremetev family, it had plenty of money for signing loans.
Except for its habit of nicking other peoples serfs, the railroad from Moscow to Smolensk was a project that Boris strongly approved of. It was wooden rails, since Russia was well-supplied with wood. Iron and steel were way too expensive for such a massive project. Boris wondered about the railroad. Sheremetev tended to be on the pro-Polish-or at least the less-anti-Polish-faction in the Duma. The railroad could serve to facilitate trade with Poland, and through Poland with Austria-Hungary, but it could also be used as logistical support for an attack on Poland. Boris wondered which Sheremetev had in mind. Probably both.
Meanwhile the industrial base along the Volga was producing more and more goods. Mostly simple stuff. The stuff that didn't need that much infrastructure. But it was surprising how much fell into that category, when it wasn't competing with established products.
"And our factory?" Boris waited for his son to find the figures, then said, "Excellent. Absolutely excellent."
Freeze drying is expensive and time consuming when compared to canning… if you already have the infrastructure for a canning industry. It's much less so when it's competing against small-
scale canning and down-time preservation methods. Once you had the foods freeze-dried, they were light weight and stayed good for a long time. Which made them highly prized, both by the military and the civilian population. Boris' family and some partners from the Grantville Bureau had put together a small freeze-drying plant near the family's lands and added a lot of gardening. Diced carrots, onions, peas, cabbage, beets, even berries, were all being diced up and freeze dried. Then sealed in waxed paper pouches and stored in crates. Quite a bit of it was sold to the army and more in Moscow. Aside from the extra income, it meant that they had fresh (or the next thing to it) fruits and vegetables even in late winter and early spring. Which did good things for the health of his family and his serfs.
The new farming equipment meant that he needed a lot less labor in the fields most of the time, which had given the serfs time for the gardening. Boris, with his connection to the Dacha and the information from Grantville and the Ring of Fire, was running a year or more ahead of his neighbors, which meant that his family was doing a lot better than others of the same rank. Which was a good thing because there was considerable inflation of paper money and silver was increasingly hard to come by. A paper ruble was-by law-worth the same as a silver ruble, but-in fact-worth less. How much less? No one knew. Gresham's Law was working at full force in Russia where the ruble was legally the same whether silver or paper, but not in Grantville where American dollars weren't tied to silver. Boris was, of course, paid in paper rubles-so the farm income was especially important.
***
Bernie peeked at Anya from under his floppy hat. He'd taken to wearing it lately, just to keep her from knowing that he was… looking at her. Longing for her, really.
The bitch. Why in the world couldn't he get her off his mind?
Cold hearted. Bitch. Spy.
