but you might have left a bit more for me. Don’t worry about it, Natasha. Every man here has wanted to give Cass a lesson in manners from the moment he arrived. He’s earned this, in more ways than you know.”
Bernie picked Cass up and leaned him against the handy cart, propping him carefully. Cass’ knees buckled and he went down again. “I do think you could have left me some, Vladislav. Considering it was me he pushed.”
“I apologize, Bernie Janovich.” Vladislav bowed precisely. “But there was very little to it. I thought there would be more. Perhaps tomorrow.” Cass groaned.
Natasha sniffed loudly and retreated to her tent. “Men!” She stopped at the entrance. “It has been a busy time and I do not read well in a sleigh. I have not had time to read any but the most essential messages from Grantville. We finally have an evening not filled with politics and you children decide to throw a brawl. Keep the noise down. I don’t wish to be disturbed again tonight.”
Fifteen minutes later Bernie and Vladislav had arranged the semiconscious Cass on one of the carts. They were about to walk back to the fire when Natasha came storming out of the tent again. There was a letter in her hand.
“You fool!” she shouted at Cass. “Why didn’t you tell me that my brother wishes to marry Brandy Bates?” Then she hit him.
“Darn it!” Bernie complained, laughing. “I never get a turn.”
Of that charge, at least, Cass was innocent. He hadn’t known. He had left Grantville before Vladimir had sent the letter and it had caught up en route.
Chapter 44
December 1633
“Vladimir sent a whole packet of letters with your car, Bernie, and even more of them with Cass,” Natasha said. “There’s more about the steam engines.” She handed Filip the booklet, since he spoke better German than Bernie.
Filip started reading the booklet and less than a page in began to ask Bernie to define some of the terms. They went over the directions and the calculations in the booklet and called in a few more of their experts, and started working up a modified design for the steam barge engines. These new ones would have slightly tighter tolerances, more wood, less leather and be more powerful for their size. They would still, in essence, be low- pressure steam engines, but with this new information they felt they could push the envelope a little bit.
“What are we going to do about Cass?” Natasha asked Bernie two days after that meeting. “He managed, just barely, to be polite to the czar. Other than that, he has offended everyone who has met him.”
Bernie grinned. “Give him to the military. Specifically to the Streltzi bureau.” The Russia military was a weird mix of feudal duty and bureaucratic confusion. The bureaucratic nobility included the officers in time of war. They were the officer corps and the cavalry. The Streltzi were the infantry in time of war and the city guards in time of piece. One of the things that the Streltzi had picked up from Bernie was fingerprinting. By now most of the criminals in Moscow had had their fingerprints taken or paid considerable bribes to avoid it. The Streltzi hadn’t picked up on the notion of civil rights, though Bernie had offered it up. In the last few years, mercenary companies hired from the west had been added to the mix. The mercenaries who had a different way of fighting weren’t mixing in too well. “We get more requests from them than anyone else. Besides, it might do Cass some good to be surrounded by cops for a while.”
Natasha was nodding. Bernie had been urgently called to various military bureaus over the last few months. Especially the Streltzi bureaus. The Streltzi preferred to fight behind walls, city walls. When they could not fight defensively behind the walls of a city they wanted to fight behind walking walls. The “stand and take it” philosophy of the western mercenary infantry was not in their traditions. They had no objection to dishing it out and did not lack courage, but standing in the open and taking it just seemed stupid. “Do you think it will work?”
Bernie sighed “Maybe, but I doubt it. But worst case, it gets him out of our hair and gets the military bureaus off my back.”
“So the Gun Shop will have their own up-timer.” Natasha laughed out loud. “Who knows? Maybe General Shein can handle him.”
“I don’t care if he wants to fuck the czarina,” Mikhail Borisovich Shein said. “We have our own up-timer now, and he’s one who can fight.”
His aide took it in stride. General Shein was a volatile man by nature. The calculation hidden by the volatility was harder to see; most people never did. “What should we do with him, sir?”
“We do what Princess Natalia suggested. Assign him to the Gun Shop with Korisov.” The general snorted. “And keep him away from anyone important. Question him extensively, but not harshly. If that doesn’t work, we can use stronger measures. From what I understand, the main reason we got him is that he managed to miss out on, or fail at, the opportunities in Grantville. No one will miss him much.”
The aide made a note and went on to the next item on the agenda. “The Streltzi are arguing with the outlander solders about their walking walls again.” The aide was a bureaucratic noble and therefore an officer in the Russian army. He didn’t think all that well of the foreign mercenary companies or the Streltzi — who, when not called to active service, made up the merchant class in Russia.
The general gave him a cold look. Mikhail Borisovich Shein had commanded a force made up mostly of Streltzi at Smolensk during the last war with Poland. They had held out for twenty months against a force ten times their size. Whatever the traditional animosity between the two classes, General Shein didn’t share it. At the same time, he was fully conversant with the Russian army’s need to modernize. Slowly, he began to smile. “But what is ‘modernize’ in a world where we have people from the future? Find me two men, Georgi Ivanov. One outlander officer and a Streltzi. Send them to the Gun Shop. Put them in a room with the up-timer and let them argue about it. Even Korisov might have some thoughts on the matter.”
Part Four
Chapter 45
January 1634
After some initial sparring, Cass and Andrei got along quite well. Each was convinced that he was the only person that mattered and each held the other in none-too-veiled contempt, but they were useful to each other and knew it. Andrei made sure Cass had access to a plentiful supply of young girls, vodka, hunting, and other sport. In return, Cass provided Andrei with a good, and in a way more up-to-date, up-timer knowledge base.
Cass really was bright and his Russian was improving rapidly. He had lived in Grantville for a year and more after the Ring of Fire. A lot of tricks and workarounds had been developed in that time, so Cass was quite a bit more familiar with the how-to of building a modern tech base than most up-timers had been before the Ring of Fire. For instance:
“What you need is a drop forge, Andy,” Cass said a few weeks after he had arrived at the Gun Shop. “Instead of building AK3’s by hand.”
“A drop forge?” Andrei was none too fond of being addressed as “Andy,” but it wasn’t worth it to fight through his current hangover.
“Yep. Take a big-ass weight. Lift it up about ten feet, then drop it. Force is mass times velocity, and by the
