1636 The Kremlin Games (30 page)

The door slammed open, jerking Cass out of his daydreaming. “What is it?”

“We got a message from Moscow,” Andrei said. “A rider brought it.”

“Why didn’t they use the radio?” Cass asked. He and Andrei generally preferred to only deal with the spies they knew about. They weren’t fond of visits from Moscow.

“It’s broken. Again,” Andrei said. The radio network was new, incomplete, and full of problems. It was plagued with equipment failures because each and every radio was hand-built, as were the alternators that powered them. Andrei handed Cass the message.

Cass looked at it blankly. Cass couldn’t read Russian, as Andrei well knew. It was just one more of Andrei’s little digs. Just like the double bandolier Andrei was wearing. More tooling than Cass had, and way the hell more gold leaf. Cass had introduced the bandoliers less than a month after arriving at the Gun Shop and over the past couple of months they’d become all the rage. The advertisement of personal power and wealth that a bandolier full of chambers represented was irresistible to a certain class of Russian noble.

“General Kabanov wants to know when we will be delivering the shipment of AK3’s to the Moscow
Streltzi
. He’s getting impatient. If we don’t get them there soon, he’s liable to call for an investigation.”

“Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev will never let that happen,” Cass said. “He’s in this up to his eyeballs. We had to pay him enough. Tell Kabanov a month, just like we agreed. Look, Andrei, we’ve talked this out before. Everybody knows that we’re skimming. Only you, me and Ivan Petrovich know how much. This is brand new stuff. There’s no way for anybody outside to tell how many failures we have for every working gun. A fifty percent failure rate isn’t unreasonable. And a forty percent failure rate, with us skimming ten percent, that’s pretty good. Most of your guys aren’t going to realize how well the drop forges are working now. So we sell one gun for every gun we deliver and we make a fortune. We deliver two chambers with every gun and sell five, and we make another fortune. We keep it up a few years, then we retire to rich estates, just like we planned.”

Andrei was rubbing his hands together but it was clear to Cass that Andrei’s sense of entitlement was winning out over his caution.

“So we write General Kabanov a nice letter, telling him that we’ve had serious quality control problems, but we will, through long hours and hard work, soon have the full complement of two hundred rifles for the Moscow
Streltzi
.”

“And what do we tell him about the cannon?”

Cass winced. The cannon were a whole other issue. Cass wasn’t the most sensitive guy around and he had killed people in the heat of a fight and worked the servants hard in the Gun Shop, but the casual way Andrei sacrificed serfs and slaves to the development of new weapons had horrified him. Well, bothered him, anyway. The problem with the cannon was figuring out how many teeth an iron breechblock needed—or even a moderately high carbon steel one.

When Cass had arrived, Andrei was working up an interrupted screw ten threads deep. Vladimir had provided the basic designs. When a double-charge, the standard testing charge, was tried in the gun, it had blown the breech out as though it hadn’t had any threads. The breechblock had sailed like a cannon ball, bounced off the ground, shifting fifteen degrees to the right, torn through a wall twenty meters behind the gun, and killed four people. Kill was really too mild a word. It had pureed four people. Or at least the parts of them that had been in the way. The only good thing you could say about it was it had mostly been quick.

Andrei wanted to try a fifteen-thread interrupted-screw design next and that was what they had done. Andrei also wanted a Welin breechblock, but he couldn’t have one. The Welin was a complex breechblock with levels of threading so that more of the breech could be threaded. But while Russian craftsmen were good they were
slow! slow! slow!
in terms of making something as big and complex as a Welin block. Between the Russian craftsmen and the Dacha, they could make standard bolt-cutting and nut-cutting tools in the sizes needed, so the Gun Shop could cut the threads in the breech and the breechblock. But the sort of complex shaping necessary for the Welin would have to be done by hand. And it would take months for a single breech to be hand cut. They made do with an interrupted-screw. Cut the threads into the block and the breech, then grind down the threads so that the block could be slid into the breech and screwed a quarter turn to lock it in place. That meant they needed a longer block and more threads to hold the same amount of force and the metal they were using wasn’t as consistent in its strength as twentieth-century metals which—again—meant a longer, heavier block.

Cass’ first contribution had been the notion of starting with a quarter-charge and gradually increasing the charge till they got to the standard double-charge or the breech blew so they would be able to tell how much they needed. “After all,” Cass had argued, “with a breech loader we can open the breech and use a ramrod to clear the barrel if we need to.”

That had saved time by letting them know just how much of a charge was needed to blast out a fifteen-thread deep breechblock. It turned out that to be safe they needed a thirty-thread block and that made for a very heavy breechblock. It needed supporting gear and bearings to hold it up and make it movable. And it was what would be called in another universe a “three-motion” block. Rotate, pull out, swing aside—four actions in point of fact—because a blast shield had to be swung into place. Some of the charge leaked out the less-than-perfect seal between the breechblock and the bore of the gun. Enough to be deadly dangerous to the gun crew without the shield.

All of this made the process of loading the rifled piece cumbersome. Not, however, as cumbersome as loading a muzzle-loader. They were small-bore guns for the weight of shot they fired and because they were rifled, they had a smoother, straighter trajectory. But they were slow to make and expensive. The Gun Shop had two of the eighty-caliber light cannon ready and parts for four more, but it took weeks to finish and fit the breechblock and threading for each gun. They might have four ready by the end of May, but three was more likely.

Cass shook his head. “Tell him we’ll try, but we don’t expect to have four by the end of May or five by the end of June. We’ll send him the guns as fast as we get them made and we’ll go ahead and send the two we have to now so he can train crews on them.” Cass paused. “The volley guns are doing well. And we should have half-a-dozen of them by the end of May.” Fortunately the volley guns used the standard chamber and barrel of the AK3. It just used twenty-four of them in three rows of eight. All they needed was the plate that held the chambers in place and the mounting carriage. It would divert some of their on-the-side AK3 rifle production, but this way they could claim that the volley guns were the cause of the delay.

Chapter 48

April 1634

“The police want to talk to you,” Gregorii said in his heavy Russian accent.

“Oh, Lord,” Brandy muttered. “What’s gone wrong now?” She picked up the phone receiver and said, “This is Brandy Bates. How can I help you?”

“Is that you, Brandy? I was trying for your Russian,” Angela Baker, the police dispatcher said.

“He’s off doing spy stuff, I bet, Angela. What’s up?”

“Well . . . we’ve got a caravan of Russians downtown. Lots of them. Are they yours?”

Brandy’s heart sank into her stomach. “Probably. We were expecting them around now. More or less.”

Angela laughed. “I’ll send them out to you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

*     *     *

The dragon ladies didn’t arrive alone. Over a hundred Russians came with them: a priest, his family, students of medicine, engineering, architecture, aeronautics, oil wildcatting and a host of other interests. But the dragon ladies ruled the caravan, three ladies of great houses. All three of them were mothers or grandmothers of boyars. One was a friend of Vladimir’s Aunt Sofia, Madam Lukashenko.

She was, Vladimir insisted, Brandy’s friend at court. Brandy’s enemy at court was Madam Sheremetev, as the old bat made clear with a sniff the day they arrived. The neutral, Madam Streshnyova, was a friend of the czarina’s mother, which Brandy figured was at least marginally a good thing. By now Bernie had been in Moscow for over two years. A Russian had flown not that long after Jesse Wood did. Admittedly, in a lighter-than-air balloon rather than an airplane, but flying was flying. There were plows and Fresno scrapers being made in some place called Murom. And an essential element to it all was Vladimir Gorchakov. Increasingly Brandy Bates was another essential element, doing for Vladimir here in Grantville what Bernie was doing in Russia.

As she did right now, arranging for housing for the flood of new arrivals. A number were allowed to rest from their trip, then sent on to the Wietze oil fields. Some were set up in one of the new subdivisions that had sprung up outside of the Ring of Fire and some were installed in the
Residentz
. But while Brandy could place most of them, the dragon ladies were unwilling to go where they were told.

“What about suites at the Higgins Hotel?” Brandy asked, feeling a bit desperate. Madam Sheremetev and her kabuki makeup was about the scariest woman she’d ever met.

“Oh, not for me,” Madam Lukashenko said. “I told Sofia that I’d stay with you. Natasha said that you have a fine house, the one your mother left you.”

Great
, Brandy thought.
A built-in chaperone, what a thrill.
She forced a smile. “That will be splendid, Madam Lukashenko. I do have three bedrooms, if another of you would like to stay with me.”

Madam Sheremetev sniffed. Again. That sniff was beginning to make Brandy jump, because it always boded ill. “The, ah, Higgins, you said? A suite there, I think.”

Brandy couldn’t resist. “I’ll call and see if they have one available. They might not have room.”

“Of course, they will make room for me.”

“I’d be very careful of expressing that view at the Higgins,” Brandy said, enjoying the moment. “You wouldn’t be the first great lady to be told that there’s no room for you there, even if the hotel was empty. Delia Higgins does what she wants.”

That sniff again. A big sniff this time.

“And you, Madam Streshnyova? Where would you like to stay? The
Residentz
is pretty full.”

Madam Streshnyova was Brandy’s favorite so far. It didn’t seem to matter to her that her niece was the czarina. And Brandy could tell that Madam Streshnyova was sick to death of Madam Sheremetev.

“Oh, anywhere is fine for me,” Madam Streshnyova said. “I don’t need the Higgins. Perhaps there’s another hotel? Or a room at the
Residentz
, if that’s possible.”

Brandy decided to make it possible, one way or another.

*     *     *

Since Brandy had gone and fallen in love with the dashing Russian prince, she buckled in and the Barbies helped. Well, the Barbies helped some, as they had time. They were still going to school, they had their business interests, but they did manage to pop up and save the day more than once.

The wedding had a tentative date sometime in the summer of this year. Meanwhile, the dragon ladies were going over Brandy’s pedigree and tut-tutting all the while because they couldn’t find any nobility at all in Brandy’s recorded ancestry. They were discovering for themselves what any number of western European down-timers had already learned—that Americans just didn’t fit neatly into established lines, pedigrees and social estates. Technically, all up-timers were commoners. In the real world . . .

It wasn’t that simple. Any number of down-time prominent families had already tacitly decided that for all social purposes up to and including marriage Americans could be considered equivalent to the aristocracy. “Honorary noblemen,” as it were. But the Russian delegation was made of sterner stuff and not yet ready to call it quits.

By May, Brandy was ready to pull a Saint George on all three of the dragon ladies. But letters were still flowing back and forth between her and her Russian pen pals. The czarina was enthusiastic about the dirigible they were building in Bor on the Volga, though it was expected to take over a year to complete. Natasha was enthusiastic about the new industries that were starting up in Russia, especially in Moscow and Natasha’s family seat, a town called Murom on the Oka River. The Oka, Brandy learned, was the river route from Moscow to the Volga and Nizhny Novgorodi. The Volga was developing into the Russian industrial corridor. And, in some ways, it was doing it faster than it was happening in Germany. Russia had farther to go and fewer people to take it there, but it was an autocratic state. If the government decided there would be a dirigible, there darn well will be a dirigible. If Princess Natasha decided that they would build steam engines in Murom, they will darn well build steam engines in Murom.

An open society whose economy was based mostly on free enterprise might be great for innovation and dynamic in the long run. But over the fall of 1633 Brandy had been forced to the realization that when it came to putting innovations into production . . . well, the expression “shoot the engineer and put it into production” took on a whole new urgency when the authority really could shoot the engineer. It wasn’t nice and it didn’t fit with her image of either Natasha or the czarina, but it did get results. It got results even when neither Natasha or the czarina had any intention of shooting anyone. Just the fact that they could brought results.

Brandy paid attention to these things in part because it was increasingly her job as Vladimir’s primary up-timer consultant, but also because it gave her something to distract her from worrying about what the dragon ladies from the Russian steppes were sending home and whether they would be able to scuttle the wedding.

*     *     *

“That . . . that . . . raving bitch!”

“What’s the matter now, my darling?” Vladimir asked. “Which of our dragon ladies has made you angry?