1638: The Sovereign States

Book : Ring of Fire

by Eric Flint, Gorg Huff, Paula Goodlett

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alternative History sci-fi; Time Travel

Synopsis

The fate of Russia hangs in the balance as up-timers and down-timers battle for freedom!
The United Sovereign States of Russia struggles to set in place the traditions and legal precedents that will let it turn into a constitutional monarchy with freedom and opportunity for all its citizens.
At the same time, they’re trying to balance the power of the states and the federal government. And the USSR is fighting a civil war with Muscovite Russia, defending the new state of Kazakh from invasion by the Zunghars, building a tech base and an economy that will allow its money to be
accepted in western Europe, establishing a more solid claim to Siberia, and, in general, keeping the wheels of civilization from coming off and dumping Russia back into the Time of Troubles.
Or, possibly even worse, reinstalling the sort of repressive oligarchy that they just got rid of.

Release date: September 5, 2023

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 400

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Industrial Accident

 

Ruzukov foundry, Ufa, Russia

July 18, 1637

Izabella Utkin looked up from the desk in her office and grinned. “Welcome, congresswoman. Hey, everyone. It’s the congresswoman from District Two of the state of Ufa.”

“Appointed, not elected,” Vera Ruzukov pointed out as she looked around the office and at the smaller, younger woman. Izabella was five foot three with blue eyes, golden blonde hair and a curvaceous figure. An attractive young woman who’d settled down a lot since she’d married Alexander Volkov. The office was a smallish room off the main foundry floor where the noises of factory work could be heard in the background. There was a drafting table against one wall and Izabella was seated at a rolltop desk. A couple of clerks sat at smaller desks.

“Well, we can’t hold a proper election until we get some sort of count on the number of people in the district,” Izabella said.

District Two of the state of Ufa was the northern district, which included the part of the state north of the city of Ufa and east of the border with the state of Kazan, and the possible state of Perm. (That hadn’t been settled yet.) The borders had been drawn in the constitutional convention and were tentative and would only last until a state’s government accepted or rejected the constitution.

Which Vera knew was a pretty darn big stick. If, for instance, Perm failed to ratify, there was nothing to stop Kazan—or Ufa, for that matter—from annexing the territory that was now on the map as Perm. They would have to get the permission of the federal government, but still, it rather intensified the stakes with regard to whether or not to join.

In the meantime, in need of a congress and with a lack of means to elect one, Czar Mikhail had decided to appoint the governor of Ufa. Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov, Izabella’s husband, had gotten the nod, and had appointed Vera Sergeevna Ruzukov to be the first congresswoman from District Two. Which appointment, Vera suspected, Izabella resented a little.

“Anyway, I’m not here about that. I’m here to see my husband. Where is Stefan?”

“He’s over at Efrem Stroganov’s new copper factory, helping to install the steam boiler for their generator system.”

Ufa still didn’t have, and wasn’t likely to get in the near future, any sort of central power grid. What it had instead was something over a hundred small steam-electric generation plants, each owned by an individual business, and most selling their excess electricity to nearby buildings. Localized brownouts were daily occurrences. Efrem Stroganov was just in from Moscow, the second son of one of the great families, and was using his bank account to get into the large-scale manufacturing of copper wire. For which he needed heat, acids, electricity and drawing equipment to purify, melt, and draw the wire.

The New Ruzuka Foundry had gotten the contract to make the actual steam engines that would power the whole thing. The New Ruzuka Foundry was owned by Stefan, Vera, Izabela, and about half the villagers in New Ruzuka. It was a big contract and a lot of money, but also a new industry for them. Since the foundry had been built, it had been making guns or parts of guns.

There was a boom. A big boom, like a large gunpowder charge going off. Vera and Izabella ran out of the foundry building, onto Irina Way, and saw a mushroom cloud. An actual mushroom cloud. And it was in the direction of Efrem Stroganov’s new copper foundry.

Vera started to run and got less than a step before Izabella grabbed her arm. Vera almost slugged her, but Izabella shouted, “Get the men! We’re going to need their help!” Then, rather than going back into the building, Izabella ran across the street to get the factory there to send men to help.

✧ ✧ ✧

Stefan thought he was dead again. The blast hadn’t come from Efrem Stroganov’s new foundry, but from a building next door, where they did something

with chemicals. He thought it was making cleansers or fertilizers. However, the blast was enough to knock down the building they were standing in. Not knowing what was going on, but knowing that the firebox was made of crucible steel and weighed over three tons, Stefan—a big man by any measure—grabbed Efrem Stroganov and his foundry manager, and dragged them with him to the ground next to the boiler. It was an almost instinctive reaction. Not to combat, but to industrial accidents.

Having done so, Stefan lay there while the world fell down on all of them. They ended up in a little tent, with the firebox holding up a chunk of the collapsed ceiling and one of the rafters lying across the three of them, not quite crushing them because the newly installed firebox was holding up one end.

The fire from the explosion started to produce smoke and there was no way out. They were well and truly trapped in a mostly wooden building that was apparently on fire. Stefan looked around their little hidey-hole and saw a foot attached to a leg under rubble.

Then, Efrem Stroganov shouted, “Get off me, you great peasant oaf!”

Stefan tried. There wasn’t much room and one of his feet was trapped in an even more confined space and was at least sprained, possibly broken, when a bit of wall or roof had landed on it. But pushing up with his back, he managed to lift the roof of their tent a little, and free his foot. He got to his knees and then crawled over Efrem to get to the other foot he could see.

“I said—”

“I heard you,” Stefan interrupted. “But there is a man down over there. Check on your foundry manager.” In the excitement, Stefan had forgotten the man’s name.

“Don’t give me—” Efrem Stroganov stopped and Stefan grinned. By now the fact that Stefan had killed a man with a single blow of his fist was well known from Shavgar to Moscow. And apparently Stroganov had just remembered it.

Realizing that his reputation for violence might have its advantages, Stefan shifted around and grunted as the movement exacerbated the pain in his right foot. But he got his back against the boiler and, using his left foot, tried to push up a heavy timber that was pressing against the leg of the unknown man.

Then, quietly, from behind him, he heard Efrem Stroganov say, “Thank you, Stefan Ruzukov.” It was said quietly, but with intensity. Stefan looked over and saw where Efrem was looking and realized that if they’d still been standing where they had been when the roof came down, they’d be dead for sure.

Not knowing what

to say, Stefan said, “Reflex. Help me with this wood.”

Efrem looked over at Stefan and laughed. “Good reflexes, man. Good reflexes.” Then he rolled around so that he could add his leg muscles to Stefan’s. They got the beam lifted, but the man was dead.

“We need to get into the firebox,” Stefan said.

“Why?”

“It’s designed to keep fire in. So it ought to do a decent job of keeping it out. Don’t you smell the smoke?”

Efrem sniffed. “Yes, but I hadn’t realized. Ufa always stinks of smoke and fire.”

That was true enough. With all the factories in the city now, the place always stank. But Stefan was used to that stink. This was wood burning, not coal or oil. By now Ufa was getting regular shiploads of oil from the Safavid Empire, and the city was using every drop to provide power to run machines that were making people, including Stefan, rich. In fact, Stefan was now worth more than his old lord, Colonel Ivan Nikolayevich Utkin, had ever been. He laughed. Assuming that they survived to enjoy that wealth—which didn’t seem likely at the moment.

Stefan found the door of the firebox. The firebox was huge, designed to produce a lot of steam fast. It was double walled with an air gap and would have been surrounded in firebrick if the installation were completed. It had a yard-tall door on one side, to allow people to get into the thing to clean the oil jets, shovel in coal or remove ash as needed. It would be cramped, but they could all squeeze in.

Meanwhile, Efrem was checking on the foundry manager. “Iosif, wake up.”

“Iosif.” That was it. Iosif Ivanovich Putinov was the foundry manager’s name. “Bring him over here.” Stefan grunted as he tried to shift more fallen second floor out of the way to get the firebox door open.

✧ ✧ ✧

By the time Vera, Izabella, and the people they could gather got there, at least four buildings were in flames. They were all around a big hole in the ground where a brand-new chemical plant had been earlier that morning. And all four buildings were completely engulfed in flames.

Izabella took one look and said, “Oh, Vera. I’m so sorry.”

“Forget that. Stefan’s already died on me once, and I told him not to do it again. I won’t believe he’s dead until I see the body.”

She said it strongly and with conviction, but Izabella didn’t believe her. Then there was no more time to talk. Only to bring water and throw it on the fire. There were fire engines in Ufa now. This wasn’t the first fire, not by two dozen or more.

It was, Vera thought, the worst yet.

But there was a pump wagon that was based on a design that Brandy Bates Gorchakov had seen in a movie. And it was in use, with six big men seesawing the handles to produce a steady stream of water from the river.

Between the wagon and the bucket brigades, they were containing the fire, but not putting it out.

Izabella looked over at Vera. The woman was taller than her, with her dark hair in a tight style with a ponytail down the back. Her greenish-brown eyes were wet with unshed tears. The stocky woman’s face was set in

hard lines, something that Izabella rarely saw, for Vera was as gentle and caring a woman as Izabella had ever known. She almost always had an easy and open smile. Right now, though, her face was frozen and her hands moved with mechanical rhythm as she moved bucket after bucket along the line to the fire.

✧ ✧ ✧

Inside the firebox it was pitch black and getting decidedly hot. Hot enough and stuffy enough so that Stefan was starting to wonder if that was going to prove a better death than the flames. They at least would have been quick. What made it worse was, Stefan knew the design of the firebox. It was specifically designed so that a worker could come in with soap and water and move around to clean and dry the thing. It had plenty of room for one man, was cramped for two, and uncomfortably close for three. It was double walled for insulation, but also for reverse flow. A pipe entered at the top of the furnace, then opened into the space between the inner and outer wall. The air flowed down between the walls and into the firebox. What terrified Stefan was that that intake was high enough so that the smoke would be sucked into it and they would all die of smoke inhalation while they slowly cooked. He needed something to take his mind off it.

“Do you think that Perm will join?” he asked Stroganov.

“What? Right now, I don’t care! How are we going to get out of here?” There was more than a bit of panic in Efrem Stroganov’s voice.

“We don’t!” Stefan said harshly. “We stay here till the fire’s out or we die here.” He took a breath. “If we’re lucky, they will get the fire under control before we bake. If not, I’m sure our funerals will be elegant. I would rather think of something else. So, do you think that Perm will join the United Sovereign States of Russia?” He enunciated each word. By this time most people referred to the United Sovereign States of Russia simply as “the Sovereign States,” but Stefan used the whole name.

Efrem stared at Stefan in confusion for about five beats. Then he laughed. It was a short bark of a laugh, but it was a laugh. “They’ll either join us or join the Muscovites,” Efrem said. “The way the constitution worked out doesn’t give them a lot of choice. If they try to sit on the fence like Shein is doing up around Tobolsk, either we or the Muscovites are going to eat them whole.

“In fact, that’s what that moron, Birkin, should have done last winter. He should have turned east at Kruglaya Mountain and made for the Kama River.”

“General Tim would have seen that play a mile away,” Stefan insisted, and Efrem snorted another laugh.

“You guys put a lot of faith in your boy general.” He waved away Stefan’s protest. “I’m not disagreeing, not really. But he is young and, well, I don’t think anyone is as good as you folks think Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev is. I think there’s too much chance in war. And it’s more about being lucky than good.”

“Are you CRAZY!” Iosif Ivanovich shouted. “We have to get out of here! And you

idiots are sitting around talking politics!”

Stefan felt him move as he tried to get to the door of the firebox. Stefan reached out an arm and slammed the man back against the inner wall, hard enough to rattle his teeth and maybe crack his skull if his head hit the wall.

“If that door opens, we DIE!” Stefan shouted the last word into the man’s face. Or at least where he thought the man’s face was. You couldn’t see a thing in this oven. And it was an oven. The inner wall of the firebox was hot. Not yet burning hot, but hot. And Stefan was covered in sweat.

He turned his head the other direction, and said to Efrem, “So, which way do you think they’ll jump? I know your family owns quite a lot of land up that way.”

“That’s why I’m building a copper foundry. There are extensive copper deposits in Perm. My cousin in Moscow will be pushing for Perm to join the Muscovites, just as I’ve been pushing Uncle Anatoly to join the Sovereign States. The problem is, my uncle is more afraid of Ivan Vasilevich Birkin than of your General Tim.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” Stefan said. “We have a river route right up to Perm. Birkin will have to go overland.”

“That probably won’t make any difference if I die here today,” Efrem said, not frightened so much as thoughtful. “With me dead, Uncle Ivan will probably go with the Muscovites.”

“Well, then it will be better for everyone if we don’t die,” Stefan agreed, and they continued to talk, with Iosif Ivanovich sobbing quietly next to them.

✧ ✧ ✧

Vera looked around. The rescuers were making progress. Several of the fires were out, and the rest were struggling as the fire wagon continued to pump water onto the fuel that the fire needed to continue.

They were starting to collect the bodies. There were a lot of them, but none from the chemical plant. Apparently, the blast in the chemical plant was extreme enough to leave no bodies, at least not large enough pieces of bodies to be identified, but a lot of people in the surrounding buildings had died of smoke inhalation or been burned to death.

Vera was starting to lose hope in spite of herself. Several bodies had been recovered from the still burning ruins of the copper foundry. None of them were the size to be Stefan, but if he’d gotten out, he’d have been fighting the fire with the rest of them. “Where are you,

you great fool?” she muttered. “You’d better not be dead.” She wiped the tears from her eyes, and went back to moving buckets of water from the river to the fire.

✧ ✧ ✧

Stefan heard the sound of water hitting hot metal and flashing to steam. It was a distinctive sound. Stefan wished he’d been wearing his tool belt. He hadn’t worn it because Izabella insisted that as a member of the service nobility, he shouldn’t wander around with the tools of a blacksmith. By now the inner wall of the firebox was hot enough so that they all had cloth between their bodies and the hot steel wall. Stefan still wasn’t ready to risk the door of the firebox not knowing what was outside of it, but he wanted to let the people out there know that there were people alive in here. So he asked Efrem, “Do you have anything metal on you?”

“My pistol.”

Stefan slapped his head. He had his pistol too. It was a status symbol to wear one of the new caplock revolvers and Stefan owned a factory that made metal parts. By now, most of the workers in his factory owned caplock revolvers.

He pulled his pistol and pounded it against the inner wall of the firebox. The whole firebox rang like a bell.

✧ ✧ ✧

Vera didn’t hear the firebox ring. The sound was muffled by the outer wall of the firebox, but that didn’t make it silent, and one of the people looking for bodies heard it. The firebox was only about a quarter exposed. Three quarters of it were still covered in charred wood. But the hose was pointed at that area and soon enough it was thoroughly soaked.

✧ ✧ ✧

Inside the firebox, the water pounding on the outer shell was deafening, but the temperature started dropping almost immediately. A half turn of the crank and the door was unlatched. Stefan tried to push it open and managed to get a crack of perhaps a quarter of an inch. During the fire, wood had fallen against the hatch and blocked it, but it was enough for water to spray in and they all welcomed that.

It was only minutes later that they were released, and discovered that they were the only survivors of those in the building. Efrem was ready to murder the chemical factory owners and workers, but they were all dead too. Over fifty people had died and if they had gone wrong with the firefighting, it could have been much worse.

Ufa was a boomtown and a war base and the center of government, all at once. People stood on the docks as the steamboats came, holding up signs and shouting that they had work. If a man or a woman in good health reached Ufa and didn’t have a job by the end of the day, it was because they didn’t want one.

There were women working in foundries and factories and canning plants. And sitting on rafters, hammering roofing tiles into place, or painting roofs with tar shipped up the Volga from the Caspian Sea.

When you live like that, grabbing people off the boat and putting tools in their hands with little regard for their skill, two things happened. One was you got a hell of a lot done in a very short time. The other was that accidents happened. Some of them were messy accidents that

 killed lots and lots of people.

Everyone in Ufa knew that, or at least they should have known that. On the other hand, Vera had almost lost Stefan twice now, in the Kazakh attack and now in this disaster, whatever had caused it, which they would probably never know in any detail. Some sort of safety measures needed to be put in place, even if it did decrease production.

For one thing, stuff that blew up making big holes in the ground and mushroom clouds needed to be off on their own, away from other businesses and her husband, dammit!

 

Congress, Ufa Kremlin

July 19, 1637

Vera’s speech was moving and her proposal for a congressional investigation into the cause of the accident wasn’t unreasonable, but . . . The plan to put a moratorium on new chemical works until the cause was determined was shouted down. The demand that if they weren’t going to shut them down, they at least had to move them away from other factories and people’s homes passed in the House and the Senate, and was approved by both consuls.

But it ran into Olga Petrovichna Polzin, the effective mayor of Ufa (though her husband still held the official title) who insisted that such regulations were a matter for the city government of Ufa, not the federal government, and not even the state government. Olga didn’t object to the regulation nearly as much as she objected to the precedent that the federal government could impose regulations on the city without even consulting her. She brought suit, and within a week the case landed in Czar Mikhail’s in-basket.

It happened that fast because both Olga and Vera knew all three members of the Sovereign States Supreme Court and their wives. Which meant that none of the judges wanted to be on the record as ruling against either of those two formidable women.

 

Office of the czar, Ufa Kremlin

July 26, 1637

“Have a seat, ladies,” Czar Mikhail said, “and let’s work this out.”

The office was a large room. The walls were stained wood to a height of three feet, then white painted plaster above the wood. There was a large stove for heat in one corner. Not in use at present, except for a small fire to make tea. There was a couch that he gestured the women to, and four chairs before the large desk.

Vera and Olga took their seats. Czarina Evdokia and Princess Brandy Gorchakov were already seated. With Vera and Olga involved, Czar Mikhail

wisely wanted support. Brandy’s son, Mikey, was just over a year old and in the care of one of the czarina’s ladies in waiting, along with the youngest of the czar’s children. After the trip from Grantville, Brandy was less insistent that baby Mikey go with them everywhere.

“Olga, you first,” Mikhail said, looking at the thin woman with graying hair and frown lines around her mouth.

“I don’t want the congress making laws and regulations for the city of Ufa,” Olga said. “You know what will happen. Someone will bribe a congressman and all of a sudden Ufa cloth merchants will have to wear purple robes or some such silly thing, because it will give the cloth merchants of Kazan an advantage. Or, for that matter, the cloth merchant that has cornered the purple cloth market. Most of the congress won’t care, because it doesn’t affect their cities.”

“Vera.”

“So instead we have anarchy, where every city decides for itself, and no one is safe because the local mayor got a bribe to let them dump their waste in the drinking water. Or, as is the case here, put a bomb next door to where other people are working. And don’t tell me that a local mayor can’t be bribed.” Vera’s voice was tense.

“Maybe they can,” Olga said. “But at least they’ll be living in the same city they made dangerous. You congress people are only visiting. Well, most of you are. Even you, Vera. Your official residence is in New Ruzuka, and you spend a lot of your time there. So you guys won’t face the consequences of whatever stupid, unthought-out rule you put in place because you’re upset about something.”

“Brandy, what do you think?” Czar Mikhail looked at the up-timer woman. She was tall and thin, with clear blue eyes and smooth skin, and the amazingly straight teeth that most up-timers had.

“As loath as I am to suggest this,” Brandy said, “I think we need another bureau.”

“No!” Czarina Evdokia said, holding her hands up to hide her eyes. “Not that.” Then she laughed. “Why do you think we need another bureau, Brandy?”

“Because it helped prevent mine accidents in West Virginia and kept the mine owners from forcing miners to risk their lives unnecessarily.” Brandy had grown up in a mining town with miners who remembered the company goons and the all too often fatal working conditions. While not a fan of intrusive government in general, in some cases she figured it was necessary. The truth was that she’d been seriously concerned about the corners that had been being cut from the moment she’d arrived in Ufa. Actually, she’d been concerned about the corners cut since the Ring of Fire happened. Because it wasn’t just Ufa. Those same corners were being cut in Magdeburg, Amsterdam, Venice, and Vienna. The new tech of the up-timers were, on balance, making the world safer than it had been, but people were still putting other people’s lives at risk to make a buck, or in this case, a ruble. “What we need are professionals who have a real understanding of the risks involved and can make educated decisions based on risk and cost. And when they put regs in place, those regulations need to be applied all

over the Sovereign States, not just in one city.”

That didn’t end the argument, but it set in place a foundation for a new approach. Meanwhile, Czar Mikhail found for Olga on the basis that while congress did have the authority to make laws governing all of the Sovereign States, it didn’t have the authority to make laws that applied only to Ufa, and not Kazan, Shavgar or other places. That killed the bill in congress because the representatives of other cities weren’t going to impose such restrictions on their home towns.

✧ ✧ ✧

In the meantime, in consultation with the Dacha, Olga and the city council of Ufa put in place a set of regulations about the placement of buildings and what sort of industry could be placed where. Which, among other things, necessitated that the New Rezuka Foundry move to new quarters that were too far from the Kremlin to walk easily. On the other hand, they set up a steam trolley that went for an eight-mile route and was within reasonable walking distance of most of the town.

 

East of the Southern Ural Mountains

August 2, 1637

Ivan Yurisovich looked at his maps, then he looked around. He was in forested hills, rocks breaking up the grass as much as the trees did. There were birds in the trees and the grass was starting to turn to straw. There were nuts in the trees. It was a pleasant place even in August. Ivan was a large man with a thick brown beard. His clothing and boots were machine made, but designed for rough work. He was southwest of the Berezovsky gold mine. He wasn’t sure how far southwest because no one knew exactly where the Berezovsky gold mine was. The information from Grantville on this was maddeningly incomplete. It, for instance, didn’t mention at all the gold mine found in Kazakh, but there were quartz deposits here and the other indicators were good, so he pulled out his metal detector.

It had two wheels and weighed sixty pounds, what with the batteries and other components, but it worked. The copper coil produced a magnetic field and resonated with metal deposits in the ground.

For the next day and a half, Ivan Yurisovich got gradually more and more excited as he moved his metal detector over the dry stream bed and found more and more gold. Most of it was powder, but as he went upstream, the bits got bigger.

Then, on August fifth, he found the main vein. It wasn’t the Berezovsky gold deposit, not nearly. But it was big. Making careful notes on his maps, he collected up his gold, his equipment, and his mules, and headed back to Ufa.

 

Czar’s palace, Ufa, Russia

August 8, 1637

Mikhail woke in a cold

sweat. He suffered nightmares. He had since he was sixteen and they’d only gotten worse for most of his reign as czar of Russia. They’d gotten worse until Bernie Zeppi showed up and Mikhail was introduced to the concept of democracy and, especially, representative democracy.

Evdokia stirred beside him. She rolled over to face him and said, “Again?”

Mikhail laid back into the pillows. “Yes! I truly hate royalty. I despise the whole concept.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Evdokia said. “You’ve mentioned that before.”

“And I hate being the czar most of all.”

“I know, Mikhail,” Evdokia agreed again, softer this time. Mikhail, like Claudius of Rome, didn’t want the crown, but had never found a way to put it down. And for much the same reason, the fear of anarchy. “Was it the Time of Troubles again?” she asked. Mikhail’s nightmares often repeated themes. The “Time of Troubles” nightmare had seen the family die or Mikhail abdicate, then all of Russia collapsing into anarchy, famine, and war. The mothers of slain sons condemning him before God for failing to do his duty. They would point at the bodies of their dead children and scream that he should have stopped it.

“Yes. This time the Kazakhs were condemning me too.”

“Put it aside, Mikhail. Stick to the plan.” She reached over and turned a switch and an actual lightbulb came on. There were a few even here in Ufa and, of course, the czar’s bed chamber had one. Two. One on her side of the bed and one on his. She looked at her husband. Mikhail was a chubby man, not at all the sort of man anyone would imagine leading armies or leading a country. But, gradually, over their marriage, Evdokia had learned that appearances lied. In spite of his appearance and what he thought about himself, she had come to realize that Mikhail was the strongest man she’d ever met.

“Yes, of course,” Mikhail snarled. “First, send my boy general out to fight the best, most experienced, commanders in Russia to a standstill. Then, of course, convince Shein and the governments of all the states to follow Salqam-Jangir Khan’s example, and actually join the United Sovereign States. And, having done that, protect them from anyone who has a grudge to settle against them or just wants what they have.” Mikhail rolled over to face her and pounded his pillow. “And while I’m at it, I’ll stick one of Vlad’s internal combustion engines up my bum and fly us all to the moon.”

“You’ve been talking to Bernie too much,” Evdokia said.

“That one came from Brandy.” Mikhail grinned at her. “Your buddy can be exceedingly crude, you know.”

“Well, you can skip the moon part,” Evdokia said. Then she reached out and touched his cheek. “I hate royalty too, you know. I was almost poisoned

 too.” Mikhail’s first wife had only lasted four months and it was almost certain that his mother had poisoned her.

“So we learn how to make representative democracy work. And we can learn new things, my husband. We’ve proved that. And we will find ways of keeping in contact with the rest of the world. Ports on the east, a land route, maybe south around Poland, but some way of staying in contact with the USE so we don’t fall behind the West again. And then, if we’re very lucky, Alexi will be able to reign instead of rule, and no one will try to murder him for the crown.” She patted his cheek again. “Then those mothers will be blessing your name. At least some of them. Now, go to sleep because, for now at least, you still have to make decisions and those decisions will, if we’re lucky, keep us all alive and even most of our people.”

Mikhail looked at his wife. She was a chubby woman with brown hair and brown eyes. And he loved her with all his heart. He, in turn, reached out and touched her cheek.

She leaned in and kissed him. “Now go to sleep. There will be more meetings tomorrow.”

 

CHAPTER 2

Airplane Troubles

 

War room, Ufa Kremlin

August 10, 1637

The war room wasn’t quite an auditorium, but it was large. It was also unfinished. Ufa and the Ufa Kremlin were under construction, and it showed here. The walls were half plastered and the map table that was planned wasn’t installed yet. On the unfinished north wall was a map of the United Sovereign States of Russia that Czar Mikhail was fully aware was at least half fantasy. None of the Volga states except Kazan were actually states. They’d all sent representatives to the convention, but none of them had yet ratified the constitution. Ufa was a state but not all—or even most—of the Yaik Cossacks had agreed, and there was a good chance that at least some of them wouldn’t.

Also, Perm, Solikamsk, and the northern states mostly hadn’t ratified and, of course, neither had General Shein in Tobolsk or the settlement at Mangazenya. The Don Cossacks hadn’t signed on yet, but they were making noises like they wanted to.

Muscovite Russia controlled access to the Baltic and what was left of Arkhangelsk. They controlled the Volga down past Nizhny Novgorod, all the way to just the other side of Kruglaya Mountain. They were also lobbying the various Cossack tribes to join Muscovite Russia, or at least not to join the Sovereign States.

Muscovite Russia was the term that had come into use to describe that part of Russia that was still under the control of the Boyar Duma and claimed to be the legitimate government of Russia. Much of Russia’s manufacturing capability was concentrated in Muscovite Russia, and a lot of the army had stayed with the Boyar Duma. But defections from Muscovite Russia to the Sovereign States were becoming more common.

He looked over at Tim, still amazed at the youth of his general. Tim now had a beard, a quite respectable, if short and well-trimmed, black beard. But he still looked young.

Tim looked back and said, “The Muscovites are held at Kruglaya Mountain and I honestly don’t need most of the army to hold Kazan. We’ve been improving the fortifications all spring, and with the shipments of Portland cement we’ve been getting, we now have concrete bastions. I am fully confident that the city of Kazan is secure. The state of Kazan, at least the part of it that’s upriver of Kruglaya Mountain, is still occupied by the Muscovite army and they have been forting up too. If you want, I can take the army out of Kazan and circle around them, try to cut them off and starve them out. That won’t be easy, but it’s certainly possible.”

Mikhail shook his head. “No. We have another use for the army. Salqam-Jangir Khan is suffering more raids from the Zunghars. Apparently Erdeni Batur wants to prove his military acumen. From what our agents in the area are telling us, he wants to recreate Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire. Reconquering the other Mongol tribes, which includes the Kazakhs, is the first step toward that goal. I wouldn’t approve of that even if Kazakh wasn’t a state in the Sovereign States, considering that Russia didn’t fare all that well under the Mongols the first time. We need to start putting together a force to assist Salqam-Jangir Khan’s defense of Kazakh. And it can’t be you that goes.”

“Why not? It’s not like I’m really needed in Kazan.”

“Politics, Tim. According to the constitution, national forces supersede state forces. If I send you as the senior commander of the United Sovereign States of Russia forces, you would be in overall command of all the forces. Not independent of, in command of, and that might start a revolt of Salqam-Jangir Khan’s sultans, which is the last thing we want.”

“I could—”

“No, you couldn’t, because we also can’t have the precedent that the national army is subject to state control. I’ll grant that they’re sovereign states, but they don’t order my army about.”

Tim looked at Czar Mikhail for a moment, then nodded in agreement. “In that case, Czar Mikhail, I would like to recommend that we brevet Ivan Maslov to brigadier general, and put him in charge of an independent, but cooperating force. That will consist of most of our

forces. Meanwhile, I’ll stay here and we’ll see about making sure that General Ivan Vasilevich Birkin can’t do us any lasting harm.”

The meeting went on and they discussed fortifications and technological changes in warfare and fighting, the golay golrod, or walking walls, and how they might be combined with steam trains. The walking walls were a Russian tool of war that went back centuries, but steam and steam trains were new, and Russia, especially Czar Mikhail’s Russia, wasn’t just dealing with the increasing effects of the tech of the Ring of Fire. It was doing so in a pressure cooker of political, military, and economic necessity.

 

Moscow Kremlin

August 10, 1637

Ivan Nikitich Romanov wasn’t a particularly honorable man, nor overly brave. Neither was he an idiot. In the shakeup after Sheremetev’s disappearance, he’d ended up in charge of a fractious Duma of boyars. And Muscovite Russia was leaking ability like a sieve, as more and more people headed east to join Mikhail’s Sovereign States. He needed a victory, needed one desperately, both to secure his position as the Director-General of Russia and to keep Muscovite Russia from dissolving into warring factions that Mikhail or the Poles would gobble up at their leisure. Hell, perhaps even the Swedes would grab a bit more near the Baltic.

So almost since the day Director-General Sheremetev had disappeared, he’d been looking for a way to get around Kruglaya Mountain and Kazan. And he thought he’d found it. The village of Yagoshikha, which the Sovereign States constitutional convention had renamed Perm and made into the capital city of the state of Perm, was the key. Yagoshikha and the Kama River, which was actually bigger than the Volga before it joined it. And the Kama joined the Volga below Kazan. Take Yagoshikha, and all the fortifications on Kruglaya Mountain and around Kazan were meaningless.

At least, that’s what he told himself and the Duma.

New orders were cut, and Ivan Nikitich, not trusting the security of the radio network, had them sent by courier.

 

Hunt, state of Kazakh

August 10, 1637

Alla Lyapunov was riding a horse and considering how she’d gotten here, riding among the sons and daughters of the Kazakh upper nobility, with an Ufa-made AK4.7 carbine in her saddle holster. The AK4.7 carbine was better and more expensive than anyone else in the group had. The 4.7 was the model number, not caliber or year. AK3s were flint and wheel locks. AK4s were caplocks, and the AK4.7 was a caplock with a clip of chambers that could be fired one after another. It was a very expensive rifle and one not normally available. Hers was the only one in the group of young Kazakh nobles that she was hunting with. The group

was about an equal mix of male and female with some adults along to act as chaperones, to make sure that teenage hormones were kept in check.

That was fine with Alla. She wasn’t ready for that sort of thing yet, though boys were starting to get interesting. She also didn’t speak the Kazakh language, so she was missing most of the talk, except when someone translated for her.

It gave her time to think about how she’d ended up here. She’d never have believed that crazy cousin Vasilii would become important. And now he was a person of import in the Sovereign States, and so was his doxy, Miroslava Holmes. Well, they were engaged now and would be getting married soon. But Miroslava Holmes had been a whore in Nizhny Novgorod and in Ufa, before she met cousin Vasilii. And according to Alla’s family, “once a whore, always a whore.” Besides, Miroslava was just plain strange.

Alla giggled and got a curious look from the Kazakh girl riding beside her. “I was just thinking that it would have to be a strange girl for my weird cousin, Vasilii,” she said in Russian. The Kazakh girl nodded understanding in spite of the fact that Alla was speaking Russian. Oddly, Alla didn’t like the Kazakh girl agreeing. He was crazy cousin Vasilii, and his fiancée was a former whore who was probably “autistic,” according to Tami Simmons, whatever autistic meant. But it wasn’t all right for other people not in the family to think so.

“Yes, it’s well known that she is a witch, but he’s a witch too. Did he really make a flying machine?”

“He designed the steam engine system for the plane they are working on in Ufa, and he was involved in designing the steam system for the dirigibles all the way back to the test bed.” Of that part, she could be proud, even if it was strange.

“What’s it like to live with a witch who can read your mind?” the Kazakh girl, Raushan, asked.

“She can’t read minds.”

“Ha! I was there when she killed Bey Nazar. She knew what he was going to do before he did it. And she knew about the gold. She knows too much, your mother to be.”

That was another thing. Vasilii had adopted Alla. She was his daughter and heir, even if Miroslava had a baby. So the family lands would stay in the family. Assuming Czar Mikhail won the war.

Someone shouted and the dogs started barking, and they were off. They were riding through hilly grasslands, full of mostly dry creek beds dotted with trees of varying sizes. For the next few minutes, they rode in a mad dash after a fox that was doing its best to escape. The Kazakh adults hunted with eagles. Teens, though, hunted with dogs and bows. And, in Alla’s case, with her new AK4.7 carbine.

So they were riding over rough country on the small Kazakh horses, which were only slightly larger than ponies, but hardy. The ground was covered in brown grass that rippled as they rode, until a hound got the fox.

The fox fur would be used for Kazakh outerwear, but this hunt was a way for her to become known to the daughters of the Kazakh nobility.

That was another strange thing. How had Czar Mikhail managed to bring the Kazakhs into Russia? Papa, her real father, had always said that Mikhail was a weak man. Good and kind, but weak. Too weak to rule Russia. He’d said that right up to the day Sheremetev had sent the dog boys to kill him and the rest of Alla’s family.

Yet here she was. With the wild Kazakhs who were now part of Russia. The Kazakhs were a steppe people and, in the minds of Russians, were a wild and barbarous people. They weren’t actually proving to be nearly as wild as the stories her grandmother told would suggest. At least the Kazakhs were part of the Sovereign States, because Mikhail employed up-timer witches. And it was Czar Mikhail who had given Miroslava the family name of Holmes after a fictional detective. Because Miroslava was a detective, the only licensed private detective in all of Russia. And she didn’t solve crimes by reading minds. She did it by seeing and noticing things that other people didn’t notice. Alla had seen it.

She rode up next to Raushan and said, “She doesn’t read minds. She notices things.”

“What?” Raushan looked blank. She’d been watching the lad whose dog had the fox as he took it from the dog and held it up.

“Miroslava. She doesn’t read minds. She notices things and assembles scenarios. That’s what Cousin Vasilii says.”

“Oh!” Raushan said. “What does she notice?”

That was harder to explain. The example that stood out in Alla’s mind was the bent-over nail in the killer’s boot. But the truth was that Alla had noticed that. And that was only the last case, the one after she got here. She knew that Miroslava had solved several cases while Alla was still hiding back in Moscow. Then she remembered Cousin Vasilii describing the way he and Miroslava had met.

✧ ✧ ✧

“I’d been asked by Vera to look into a murder because I read up-timer mysteries,” Cousin Vasilii said. “And I was examining the wall where the bullet should have landed when Miroslava told me that I was looking in the wrong place.”

“You were,” Miroslava said.

“Yes, dear. I know. But I hadn’t seen the actual murder. So I didn’t know how the victim was standing when she was shot,” Cousin Vasilii said to Miroslava. Then he turned back to Alla and continued. “That’s part of Miroslava’s talent. She’d been there, knew how the woman was standing when the shot was fired, and could tell from that and the location of the entry and exit wound where the bullet came from and where it went after it went through the woman’s body.”

Alla explained to Raushan, “Things like the way someone is facing when they get

shot, and how that tells you where they were shot from.”

“That still sounds like magic to me,” Raushan said.

“Sort of. But I’m starting to understand what’s happening. And, anyway, she can’t read minds, so your thoughts are safe.” Then she grinned. “Well, sort of safe. She also watches people’s faces, and can make a pretty good guess when they’re lying.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Alla spent another ten days among the Kazakhs before she, Vasilii, and Miroslava were called back to Ufa. They spent part of each day moving south in their khibitkha with all the other wagons and horses of the moving city, then around noon they would stop to rest the horses, feed the stock, set up camp, and cook the meals which were often stews and smoked meats. The country was mostly flattish, because they were still mapping out the rail line that would eventually lead from Ufa to the Aral Sea.

The khibitkha was a huge wagon with a yurt on it pulled by a bunch of oxen. The wheels on the khibitkha were as tall as a tall man and two feet wide, three at the axle. It took three strong men to lift one, and ropes and pulleys to put one on the axle. But their khibitkha was pulled by a steam tractor. And every day after they reached the new campsite the tractor would be taken loose from the khibitkha and put to other uses, often grading the prospective rail route.

 

Ufa Kremlin

August 18, 1637

Another day, another meeting, Mikhail thought. The Volga states were still being obstreperous. And by now Mikhail was wondering how he was going to get them to see reason past the visions of tolls and tariffs dancing in their heads. Mikhail couldn’t afford to pay them the tariffs they wanted, and the economy of Russia couldn’t afford the tariffs that they would charge the steamboats that plied the Volga from Kazan to the Caspian Sea.

“I think we need a bit of gunboat diplomacy,” Bernie said.

“What exactly is gunboat diplomacy?” Mikhail asked.

“Someone used to send gunboats down the coast of South America to get the countries there to respect the rights of American businesses. I don’t remember who.”

“It was Teddy Roosevelt,” said Brandy. “Gee, Bernie, didn’t you pay any attention at all in high school? I was no college prep girl, and even I know it was the big stick guy.”

“One, your discussions of American history are a lot more recent than mine. They were last year, not in another century. And two, no, of course not. I was too busy with football and girls to pay attention to history.”

“Dumb jock,” Brandy said.

“You leave him alone,” Natasha said. “I like my dumb jock just the way he is.”

“Gee, thanks,” Bernie

said.

“Settle down,” Mikhail said. “Bernie, what did you have in mind in terms of gunboat diplomacy?”

“Well, it’s the tolls that are keeping them from joining.”

“Not entirely,” Brandy corrected. “They are also considering how much more power they will have as the leaders of independent nations than as the leaders of states within the United States of Russia.”

“United Sovereign States, Brandy,” Mikhail said.

Brandy rolled her eyes. “You know that is going to bite us on the backside at some point, Czar Mikhail. In spite of clause 17b, someone in eighty years or so is going to decide that sovereign means that they can leave if they want to.”

17b was the clause that said that a state in the United Sovereign States of Russia had to get permission from the congress and the czar before it could leave. That clause was there because of the American Civil War back in that other history.

Suddenly there was a siren going off and all political discussion stopped.

 

In the air, near Ufa

August 18, 1637, two minutes earlier

Vladimir pushed the throttle for the right outboard engine forward, because it felt like that prop wasn’t spinning quite as fast as the others. He wished the props had an rpm meter. He looked around out of the windows. The sky was blue with a few puffy white clouds. They were at about eight-hundred-feet height above ground, and out from Ufa, the terrain was mostly forest. The cockpit was large, with room to look around and handle the controls. He liked the Nastas’ya Nikulichna. For a fixed-wing aircraft in the seventeenth century, she was big and strong. He turned the stick and brought her to a fifteen-degree angle. As she shifted into a slow turn, he felt a creak and a pop. He looked around and couldn’t see the problem, but the steam was dropping. Meanwhile, he was way too low and over forest, not plain.

“We’re losing steam,” Vadim Ivanovich said. “What happened?”

Vladimir barely heard him.

They were too low. The air cushion landing gear would let them land on all sorts of terrain, but not in the middle of a forest canopy. He pushed more steam to the turbines to try for more lift and tightened his turn. The right wing dropped farther and the nose dropped.

He turned the stick back the other way, trying to level her out, and she started to respond

 But they were still losing altitude way too fast.

Vadim Ivanovich was yelling something, but Vladimir didn’t catch it and was too busy to care.

He pulled the stick back and it was sluggish. The Nastas’ya Nikulichna had a power assist for the controls, but as the steam pressure dropped, so did the power assist. He could still control the flaps and rudder, but it took a lot more muscle. He got her nose up, but he was still turning to the right and now he was down among the treetops.

He missed two and just as he was about to reach the plain around Ufa, he clipped a treetop with his right wing. That ripped off about five feet of wing and jerked the plane a quarter turn to the right, which sent him over the Ufa River. He struggled to straighten her out, and he fed power to the fans that inflated the bags for the ACLG. The bags were barely starting to inflate when he hit the river.

An air cushion landing system without power is essentially a flat-bottomed boat. That kept the crash landing from being an absolute disaster, but Vladimir had bruises on his shoulders from where the safety belt jerked him when the Nastas’ya Nikulichna hit the water and went from fifty miles an hour to a dead stop in what seemed like only half a second.

Vadim Ivanovich was sitting at the engineer’s seat and just staring into space. As the Nastas’ya Nikulichna floated on the Ufa River, Vladimir noticed a smell. He looked down and saw that Vadim Ivanovich had wet himself.

The guards on the Kremlin tower saw his landing, and the air horn started blasting.

He got Vadim Ivanovich up, and they went to the door of the plane. “Can you swim?”

Vadim Ivanovich jerked and blinked, then said, “Yes.”

“Good. Take the rope and swim over to the shore.”

Vadim Ivanovich looked down and blushed. Then nodded and took the rope.

 

Moving city of the Kazakh state

August 18, 1637

Alla was reading in the yurt on wheels that Miroslava and Cousin Vasilii used. The rail line was mapped out most of the way to the Aral Sea, but the moving city was still less than a third of the way there. But the convention was finished. Most of the sultans had signed the documents, but there were three holdouts, in spite of the clear majority in favor of it. All three of the holdouts had their territories to the south and east of Kazakh and that was worrying.

Meanwhile Togym had his herders out putting in rail along the mapped route of the rail line to the Aral Sea, and every mile of rail cut the time the trip back to Ufa would take by a lot.

The radio started to clatter. It wasn’t dot dash. They were using a standard four-byte

byte for each letter and an aqualator to convert the code to feed into a teletype machine that typed out a message. The clatter was the little paper tape being typed on.

Alla had seen a disassembled aqualator back in Ufa. It was a set of tiny tubes that did calculations as the liquid flowed through the tubes. Vasilii said that they duplicated the effect of a computer, but that, compared to a computer, they were slow. Alla didn’t believe that part. Nothing could do calculations faster than an aqualator. She got up and crossed to where the paper tape was coming out of the opening in the side of the unit. She pulled the tape out of the opening and read it.

 

THE NASTAS’YA NIKULICHNA CRASHED.

GET BACK HERE.

 

Alla took the tape to Vasilii.

✧ ✧ ✧

Vasilii Lyapunov took the radio telegraph to Salqam-Jangir Khan and started talking about arrangements to leave.

“Not yet,” Salqam-Jangir Khan said. He was a stocky man with pale skin and slightly Asiatic features, black hair, black eyes, and a thin black mustache. “First, you will be married here.” He pointed at the floor of the yurt. “With us. Before all my sultans and beys.” He gave Vasilii one of his ready smiles.

“Salqam—” Vasilii started.

“It won’t take long,” Salqam-Jangir Khan insisted. “And I want it done here first. You can have another after you get back to Ufa. But you’re my nobles as well as Mikhail’s, and this will be done properly by Kazakh custom.”

Vasilii looked at the young khan’s grinning face, and knew it was a lost cause.

There were compromises that had to be made, and they were.

In a normal Kazakh wedding, the bride is presented to the groom’s family in a ceremony called a betashar. She shows proper deference, then her veil is lifted and the mother-in-law kisses her cheek, welcoming her into the family, and puts a white scarf on her head to proclaim her a married woman.

But Vasilii only had his cousin, now his adopted daughter. So Alla was the one who kissed Miroslava’s cheek, welcoming her into the family. This was followed by several hours of feasting, in this case with a fair chunk of the upper nobility of the state of Kazakh.

They rushed through it as fast as they could because by now Vasilii was desperate to get back to Ufa and see what Vladimir had done to his airplane.

 

Outside Ufa

August 20, 1637

The Nastas’ya Nikulichna was pulled up onshore, under a tent and under guard, and in another

tent Vladimir was going over what had happened again. Vladimir was the one insisting on the interviews, and that was based on movies from up-time, like Airplane, as much as anything. He knew that in the movies they investigated any plane crash meticulously. So he was the one insisting that every bit of the plane be photographed in place, then examined in detail. He was the one who interviewed everyone on the plane. In this case, just himself and Vadim Ivanovich, the flight engineer.

And neither one could tell him much. He’d been so busy that he didn’t know what he’d done in any detail. And Vadim Ivanovich had determined that he would never set foot in another airplane for any reason, but that was about all.

So he was here in this tent by the Ufa River, wishing it wasn’t quite so hot and looking at so many pictures that he didn’t have a clue what they meant.

Meanwhile, there were those who wanted to scrap the steam power system and he was close to being one of them. The problem was the Muscovites and Shein. Between the two, Ufa had a very difficult pipeline to get the internal combustion engines that were now in production in Amsterdam, Magdeburg, and Grantville. Mostly Amsterdam and Magdeburg, now that the R&D was mostly done. They were still steel block engines, but they were lightweight and air-cooled and it had cost a medium-sized fortune to smuggle a set of four of the things from the Swedish-held Baltic coast, then through Muscovite Russia to Ufa.

So if they were to go with internal combustion they were limited to one airplane. Or they had to put everything off until they took one of the engines apart and reverse-engineered it, then built the factories to make each of the parts needed to make their own engines. The blocks were easy enough, but the spark plugs were going to be a big hairy bitch to produce.

And Vladimir, even after looking at all the pictures until his eyes crossed, still didn’t know what had gone wrong.

 

Outside Ufa

August 25, 1637

The train reached the graded road with the single thick wooden rail almost forty miles south of Ufa, and only a little over an hour later they were pulling up to the city. On their way back, they’d run into five stretches of rail, from a couple of miles to this longest stretch right next to Ufa, and on all those stretches once they hit the rail, they lowered the drive wheels and sped up to ridiculous speeds. And in this last stretch, where there was tarmac road to go with the rail, it was a ride as smooth as it was fast. Alla was frankly amazed at the progress that was being made.

As they pulled into the station, there was a delegation waiting for them. And that delegation included Czar Mikhail himself. He shook Cousin Vasilii’s hand, then took Miroslava’s hands, just as if she were a princess or a boyar’s wife. Then he said, “I’m sorry that we have to rush you right back to work, but Brandy tells me that a plane crash investigation is much like any detective work. We need to know what went wrong. And why.”

After that, Alla was sent off to Vasilii and Miroslava’s rooms in the Dacha, while Miroslava and Vasilii went to look at the crashed airplane.

✧ ✧ ✧

In the small tent next to the plane, Miroslava looked at the map that showed

 the distribution of pieces. It wasn’t like one of the crashes Vladimir and Brandy talked about. Only the tip of one wing and most of the air cushion’s skirt had ripped loose. The bit of wing over three hundred yards from the place where the plane hit the water, and skirts from the air cushion all within a couple of feet of where they should be.

The photos made it clear that the plane had hit a tree, and there were some people insisting that all that had happened was that Vladimir had done something wrong and lost altitude too fast. That was a possibility. Miroslava looked at Vladimir’s description of the events, then she put the typed sheets back on the table and went to the airplane and sat in the pilot’s chair to read them. Having looked at them, they were in Miroslava’s head, so she didn’t need the actual pages anymore. She read the images in her mind.

In this case, that was especially convenient, because she could go through Vladimir’s description and copy his moves. In that way, she found several inconsistencies.

That didn’t make Miroslava think that Vladimir was hiding something. Having a consistent story meant you were Miroslava, or that you were lying. Normal people never remembered things accurately.

So she went through the whole thing and copied every move, and saw where pieces were missing or repeated, then she called Vladimir and had him go through it all again, this time sitting in the pilot’s seat.

Then she did the same thing with Vadim Ivanovich’s statement and followed his moves. There weren’t as many of those. The engineer handled the engines, and while he did have a job while the plane was in flight, eighty to ninety percent of his work was done on the ground before and after flight. Most of what he did in flight was control how much fuel was used by the boiler and control the airflow over the condenser. In the process of this part of the investigation, she learned that Vadim Ivanovich had soiled himself. Something that wasn’t in either of the reports. And she learned that he’d been yelling at Vladimir to cut power to the engines one at a time. Something he’d forgotten about in the panic of the landing.

Vadim Ivanovich wasn’t a coward, but he wasn’t comfortable with heights. The combination of the fact that he was way up in the air and that he could see trees coming at him through the windows of the cockpit had caused his mind to go blank and he’d lost some of his memory of the events leading to the crash. Or maybe he’d hit his head. He wasn’t sure, but there were blanks in his memory.

After her interview with Vadim Ivanovich, Miroslava knew that one, it was pilot error at least in part, and two, it wasn’t the pilot error that everyone thought it was.

She looked around to see Vasilii talking to Vadim. Comforting him. Miroslava didn’t know how to comfort people. So, in spite of the need

for a quick answer to what went wrong, she waited until Vasilii was done. Then she said, “Vasilii, I need to see every place where the steam goes, especially on the right wing.”

It took almost fifteen minutes to find it, even though she was pretty sure what she was looking for. And it wasn’t in the joint itself. There were three joints that had pulled loose in the crash, probably from the tree that ripped off the tip of the right wing. But there was only one place where the escaping steam had melted the doping on the skin of the wing.

 

Private office of Czar Mikhail, Ufa Kremlin

August 26, 1637

“It was pilot error, but only in how he responded to the problem. The original problem was the failure of a faulty linkage between the feeder tube and the turbine for the right outboard engine. When that happened, they lost power and Prince Vladimir did the natural thing. He fed more steam to the engine. But that was the wrong thing to do. What he should have done is feathered that engine, and fed more steam to the right inboard engine.”

“But how could I know that?” Vladimir asked.

“You couldn’t,” Miroslava said.

Then Vasilii spoke. “The mistake, if you can call it that, was inevitable and represents the greatest single weakness in the steam power system. It’s centralized. On an ordinary four-engine airplane you have four engines. If one fails, you have three left. But while the steam turbines are simpler devices operating at lower temperatures, they have one flaw. They are all powered by a single steam boiler.”

“Are you saying we should abandon the steam planes and go to internal combustion?” Czar Mikhail asked.

“No, Your Majesty, at least not for the Hero-class airplanes. The single steam boiler and condenser shouldn’t be a problem, but in the rush to get the Heroes into production, we skimped on gauges. Vadim knew they were losing steam pressure, but he didn’t know where they were losing it. Nor did he have the means of stopping the feed to that turbine. Miroslava and I have gone over the events that led to the crash, and I think that even if Prince Vladimir had had the gauges there wouldn’t have been time for him to read them and respond correctly. What is needed is an aircraft engineer who can keep track of the feeds, has the gauges to tell where a problem is, and the ability to cut off the steam to that turbine or system so that a steam leak in one turbine doesn’t bleed the steam from the whole system.”

Vladimir spoke. “The other problem was also pilot error. The test flight should have been done at greater altitude. And that was my bad decision. Altitude gives you more time to counter problems and if I had been five hundred feet higher when we had the problem, I could have landed even with all the engines out. There would have been time to respond and find a place to land. The only time a plane should be that low is when they are taking off or landing. Ferrell Smith in Amsterdam told me that several times.” 

“So what we need is to give Vadim the gauges and cutoff controls to keep that sort of failure from bleeding the whole plane dry?” Mikhail asked.

“Not Vadim,” Vladimir said. “I doubt we could get him up in an airplane again, even with a gun at his back. He wasn’t comfortable flying even before this. After almost dying . . . ” Vladimir shook his head. “But, yes, the next engineer should have those controls.”

 

CHAPTER 3

Zunghar Attack

 

Ufa docks

August 27, 1637

Ivan Maslov walked down the gangplank and saluted General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev. Ivan was a thin young man with hair and beard the color of a ripe carrot. He had piercing blue eyes that you normally didn’t notice because his face was dark with freckles.

“Welcome to Ufa, Ivan, ...