1636 The Kremlin Games (11 page)

“We put the fire under it, we waited for the bellows to lift but it didn’t. We added more wood, and then the pot split. We had injuries, Princess. The coppersmith’s apprentice was standing too close when it split. But we had no warning. Nothing at all to indicate what was going to happen. There must be a way to tell that sort of thing, but I don’t know. I won’t even know what to look for until Bernie gets back. I’ve written to your brother, asking for more information. Maybe internal combustion is safer.” Filip shrugged. “We just don’t know enough.”

“I know and I am sorry, Filip,” Natasha said. “I went by and saw the boy. He is doing well.” She took a deep breath and continued, “Some good news to end the meeting. The plows and scrapers we sent to Murom are in use and our road preparation and plowing are well ahead of schedule. We’ll meet again when Bernie gets back. But know, my friends, that the Dacha is producing good results in the wider world.”

Chapter 19

June 1632

Boris got back to Russia while the fight against the typhoid fever outbreak was still going on but after Bernie had gone back to the Dacha. The Grantville Section was, so far, not doing all that well. Boris was having organizational problems. Pavel Borisovich, his eldest son, shook his head at him. “They won’t authorize his transfer, Father.”

“Why not?” Boris felt he was asking the question with considerable restraint.

His son shrugged. “The official reason or the real reason?”

“The official one; I know the real one.” The real reason was resentment. The patriarch had gotten Boris the Grantville Section and a reasonable budget. That only fueled the resentment. There were other people who were in line for the promotion; people with better family connections. That would normally mean that if a new section was established, those people might reasonably expect to be selected to head it up. Assistant section chiefs—in and out of the embassy bureau—were angry that Boris had been jumped a rank.

“Priorities.” Pavel squinted and hunched over as though he expected a strong wind.

“I was given to understand that we had a rather high priority?” Boris tried to keep his voice calm. Perhaps too calm.

“I’m just passing on what I was told.” Pavel waved the report, then began to read. “‘Because of the requirements of the grain shipments to Sweden, Yuri Petrovich Gorbochov is desperately needed to expedite the harvest in the Gdansk region.’”

“They picked one that has a higher priority than we do.” Boris had to give that section chief credit. It was cleverly done anyway. There might even be some truth to it.

“Father, I’m not sure you do know the real reason. At least not all of them. I was talking to Petr Somovich. He said that a lot of people are starting to be afraid that this is a job that leads nowhere. Bernie is popular enough, though some of the healers are pretty upset with him. Not that much has come out of the Dacha yet. The scrapers, if they turn out to be useful, and a few other things. We have some books that mostly don’t make sense, not even to people who do speak English. Who cares that someone named Audubon painted birds? Russia has real issues to deal with.”

“I know, Son.” Boris had to concede that some of the objections to working with the Dacha crew seemed to be valid. Among the other things that Boris had brought back was a down-time copy of the first book of the
Encyclopedia International
, 1963 edition, that had been in someone’s garage. They had refused the outright sale of the books but had rented them to Vladimir and his friends for an outrageous sum. “But you never know what might combine with something else to solve a problem. We saw it again and again in Grantville. There would be an article on something that they needed but it would be missing some vital piece of information. Then that needed piece of information would show up in the biography about the man who discovered it. Something like where he was when he found the first deposit of some rare earth.”

“So you decided to send a copy of everything. I know, Father. I even agree.” Pavel’s face was serious, his dark eyes intent. “That doesn’t change the fact that spending the next ten years of their lives translating minutia about people who will never even be born seems a pointless, career-ending job to most people.”

Boris sighed. “I had hoped it would be more popular. It is a secure position, doing important work, if not the most exciting. A safe place in the bureaus.”

“That’s the problem, Father.” Pavel shrugged. “It’s not secure unless the Grantville Section becomes secure.”

Boris was left with an office and a budget and not nearly enough people who read and wrote English and Russian. The budget . . . for the moment he had plenty of money. Well, lands. The government of Russia ran on a formalized barter system because there was not nearly enough money to support the economy they had. That would be changing soon. The Assembly of the Land and the
Boyar Duma
were almost agreed on the form the Czar’s Bank would take.

The delay in the formation of the Czar’s Bank wasn’t caused just by the haggling over who got what. There was plenty of that, to be sure, but the politicians were also waiting for more excerpts from up-time economics books. They all wanted the money to work, even the fair number of boyars and other officials who didn’t believe that paper money would ever be worth anything.

*     *     *

Two days after Boris got back he had a visit from Princess Natalia. She came to his home, had tea with his wife, and talked to him about getting Andrei Korisov out of her Dacha.

“I don’t care that much that he is no doubt spying for Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev or one of that clan. Anyway, they have other spies, I don’t doubt. It’s what he’s doing with the servants of the Dacha. They are terrified to go near his little shop for fear of being drafted to pull a trigger on the latest of his experiments.”

“Is he getting results?”

Natasha sighed. “Yes, I think so, and so does Bernie. Not that Bernie is any more pleased about his methods than I am. Bernie and Filip worked up a string and pulley system for pulling the trigger and a paper cage to measure the outgassing.

“Andrei Korisov thanked them for the paper cage because it gives a more accurate read on the direction of force than a screaming, running peasant does. He just grunted about the string and pulley system for bench-firing the rifle. Apparently, saving peasants from maiming or death is not an issue of concern. Bernie, just back from Moscow and the slow plague, wanted to kill him and I wanted to let him. Even Filip was upset, and you know how conservative he is.”

Which Boris actually didn’t, but he nodded anyway. It was what you did when a princess told you that you knew something you hadn’t known. “So, Princess, clearly you have something in mind?” he asked when she had run down a little.

“Yes. I want to give him to the army or to the Grantville desk. Anywhere. I don’t really care. I just want him out of the Dacha. Bernie will still consult on weapons development and maybe the army can find him some criminals to pull his triggers for him. As long as they aren’t my people, I don’t really care.”

This was a very natural thing for a member of the nobility to say, though Boris knew most up-timers wouldn’t think so. There was a certain coldness that came with the territory. Let the monster go kill other people if it was inconvenient to stop him, just so long as they weren’t her people.

“If you try to give him to me, the bureaus will scream,” Boris said with some regret. There were contracts to be had, not just with the main army but with the
Streltzi
of all the towns and cities in Russia. “I would suggest you give him to the
Streltzi
bureau, and through them to the army. They will be thrilled.”

Which was what they ended up doing. The Gun Shop, as it came to be known, was placed at another small town about thirty miles south of Moscow and about twenty miles away from the Dacha. If there was need, they could get in touch with the Gun Shop or it could get in touch with them. And in the meantime, Andrei Korisov was out of Natasha’s hair and no danger to her servants.

Chapter 20

July 1632

“Order Kameroff to take his battalion to the west.” Bernie grinned as the barely bearded Russian wearing two stars on his collar moved his finger along the map, over a set of hills then northwest along a river. “He is to take dispatch riders and notify us at the first sign of the enemy.”

This was not the war games Bernie had played as a kid. There was no fog of war in
Afrika Corps
, or the other war games Bernie played. There, everyone could see what the other side was doing. Not in this game, which had been designed by army officers instead of geeks.

“Yes, sir,” said the veteran with the graying beard halfway down his chest and a single bar on his collar. There was probably a bit of amusement in his voice. But if the “general” felt any offense at that amusement, he kept it to himself.

The “lieutenant” left to deliver the orders. The “general’s” sigh was barely audible. This was his first time in the war room and he was clearly trying hard to keep up a good front.

It was Bernie’s first time in the war room, too. Bernie had told some of the guardsmen at the Dacha about war games and football last winter. He’d drawn plays on a slate, and a small hex grid map on another. The guards had been less interested in the football plays than in the grid map. Perhaps because the grid map war game was a game that involved dice. And in Russia, in winter, playing dice was something to do. Anyway, Bernie had spent many evenings with the guards and the serving maids building a simple war game for the guards to play and insisting that the maids should be allowed to play if they wanted to.

The guards gave in pretty easily. The girls were pretty, after all. The game was based on some battle that Ivan the Terrible had fought. The guards told Bernie the situation, how many troops of what kind Ivan had, how many the enemy had, the terrain, the supply situation, stuff like that, sometimes consulting with Father Kiril, a priest and historian, to get the details right. As they gave Bernie details, he would fold them into the game. The supply situation became supply units that had to travel back and forth to the front. Terrain was added to the map and restricted movements, till they had something approaching a working game.

Then Bernie had gotten busy with other stuff and forgotten about it. The guards, a couple of the maids and Father Kiril hadn’t. They had taken the game and continued to refine it, added other maps and other battles. The guards had told their friends in the Russian military about it and word had gotten to the generals, who in turn became interested in it as a teaching tool for young officers and some not so young. It had become quite the rage in the Kremlin.

General Mikhail Borisovich Shein, the hero of the defense of Smolensk who had avoided being the goat of the Smolensk War only by the intercession of up-timer records, said the games by themselves were the next best thing to useless, perhaps even worse than useless. Still, when combined with the experience of senior officers, they would allow the learning of war with much less loss of blood. So he had let them be played and even incorporated them, with modifications, of course, into the training of his officers.

General Shein wanted the fog of war in the games. So the official games were played in three rooms—the commander of one force in one room, the commander of the other force in another, and finally the judges in a third. This way the players could see only their troops and not all of them. Only the judges in the third room could see it all.

Bernie thought that sounded neat, but obviously entailed a great deal of work. It
was
a lot of work, but almost nothing compared to the actual moving of troops and staging mock battles. He looked back at the kids doing their planning on the game board.

“General” Ivan Milosevic was clearly a very nervous kid, as well he should be. Bernie had been briefed over beers last night. The lad had been cleaning up at the standard games, with his partner in crime, Boris Timofeivich, acting as the bank and the person the bets were made with.

The members of the service nobility didn’t choose to believe that a lowly baker’s son would be able to beat them at a game so clearly based on the arts of war. Yet the boys had been cleaning up, and because Timofeivich was not just service nobility but a member of a cadet branch of one of the great houses, they were finding it difficult to welsh when they lost. Clearly, the lads must be cheating somehow, else the arrogant little baker’s boy would have been losing. Either that or the games were not an accurate reflection of real war. Well, they probably weren’t, Bernie figured, but that wasn’t why the members of the service nobility were getting their clocks cleaned by the kid. The kid was good.

The “general” looked over at the “captain,” Timofeivich, then back at the map. It was a carefully drawn map of western Russia, Lithuania and eastern Poland, that had elevation lines in some places and little humps drawn for hills and trees drawn for forests in others.

One of the things that Vladimir had sent—before he’d sent Bernie, in fact—was a map-making kit. The Russians had been putting it to good use. It and quite a few copies of it. The kit wasn’t that much. A pair of sighting devices that could be placed at a known distance from one another. A compass and plumb bob for each device so that the direction each was pointed could be determined precisely. And something for them both to look at, a stick stuck in the ground some distance off. The rest was recording and calculation. Dictatorships do have their advantages. It wasn’t hard for the czar and
Boyar Duma
to order the maps made in this new way and to have survey teams trained. The new maps were a combination of the surveys and the maps they already had. Even though several hundred people had been put to work on the project, the results were as yet spotty. Very good right around Moscow where the teams were trained and along the rivers where the surveys were concentrated, not so good in forests where it took more work.