because Mikhail would want to do it, but because the cabinet would insist.”
Brandy knew that was all too likely an outcome. But Vladimir was continuing. “If I asked the czar first and you said no, I would look foolish. But if I asked you first and the czar said no, I didn’t know what I would do. I didn’t wish to make a promise to you until I was sure I could keep it.”
“All right!” Judy the Younger Wendell was grinning from ear to ear. “So, when’s the wedding, Brandy? What are you going to wear?”
“I don’t know to the first question.” Brandy took a sip of root beer. “And I don’t know to the second one, for that matter.”
Brandy’s friends looked confused. As a group they were often called the Barbie Consortium because they were teenagers who had gotten rich selling their old dolls-which, in one of the Ring of Fire’s most quirky ramifications, turned out to be highly prized objects for Europe’s wealthy classes. They were quite bright, generally speaking, but as could be expected from girls most of whom were no older than sixteen, their experience with life in general was limited.
Marriage was simple and straightforward, in their world view. Fall in love; get married; the bride wears a really nifty outfit and the bridesmaids wear outfits that are almost as nifty, there’s a big cake which is usually cut by the groom and in the seventeenth century they thought he got to use a really nifty sword for the purpose.
“It’s more complicated than I knew,” Brandy sighed. “It turns out that Vladimir is sort of a prince or something like that. He can’t just get married, not to a foreigner, not to anybody, really. He has to get permission.”
Vicky Emerson looked outraged. “What, from his father? He’s a grown man! Why does he have to ask for permission?”
Brandy shook her head. “His parents are dead. Both of them. He’s got a sister, Natasha. No, it’s not his parents, it’s the czar. He had to get permission from the czar. He apparently asked him before he asked me. And the czar has already sent a bunch of dragon ladies from Russia to check me out,” Brandy added, with some resentment. Vladimir had explained that they had to do it that way but it still ticked her off. “And then there’s the religion thing, too.”
“Religion thing?” Hayley Fortney paused in the act of sipping tea. “There’s a religion thing, too?”
Brandy nodded again, and sort of sighed. “Yeah. It’s all going to take a while, it looks like. I’d just as soon go down to City Hall and have a civil ceremony, get all the hoopla over with. But Vladimir’s church will not recognize a civil ceremony, he says. It’s against canonical law. And, it turns out that if he gets married in any church except a Russian Orthodox church, he could be charged with treason. So we figure we better wait.”
“That’s kind of hard, isn’t it?” Judy looked around at the girls. “Your Vladimir is a nice-looking guy. A nice guy in general, for that matter. I bet you hate waiting.”
“Well, one thing about it.” Brandy shrugged. “At least we ought to be really sure about it when it does happen. Vladimir says he probably ought to have a priest come here, anyway. Natasha is sending a bunch of people from his lands and they’re all going to go to school here. And to the oil field. So they need a priest. They wouldn’t be comfortable going to St. Mary’s. We’re probably looking at another three months to wait. If we’re lucky.”
“That’s just about enough time,” Judy muttered.
“Enough time?”
“Yeah,” Judy grinned. “Just about enough time to plan a really big, really nice wedding, no matter what else is going on here. Or in Russia, for that matter.”
Chapter 47
March 1634
Cass Lowry grinned as he idly played with an AK3 chamber, thinking about his profits. He was indeed still working at the Gun Shop, and it was proving very profitable. From his reassignment to the Gun Shop back in January, he had been helping Andrei, not just in gun production, but in gun allocation. Because in Russia everyone was on the take and everyone could be bribed. He casually slid the chamber back into his bandolier. It was nice, that bandolier. Tooled leather with gold leaf, and it really set off his midnight blue jacket.
Well, almost everyone. There were half-a-dozen steam-ram drop forges in Murom, the seat of the Gorchakov family, and one at the Dacha. But Cass and Andrei couldn’t get any of those. There were too few for any to get “lost.” A steam-ram was a single-cylinder steam engine, but it had to be a high-pressure steam engine because of the amount of force it had to deliver to lift the incredibly heavy weight of the drop hammer. Made of metal and with the need to withstand hundreds of pounds per square inch, they were very hard for the smiths of Russia to make, so there still weren’t many available.
Slaves and serfs, however, were not a problem. The Sheremetev family and their deti boyars had lands all over the place and they were looking for things to put their serfs to work on over the winter. And they weren’t the only ones. In winter you could get the labor of serfs for little more than their maintenance. So the Gun Shop had gone with the serf-powered-crank drop forge rather than the steam-powered one. It took ten minutes to slowly crank the hammer up to drop height, but that was still three chambers or chamber locks an hour. Besides, the time it took to crank the hammer up gave the die time to cool between drops, and given the quality of the metal, a hot die wasn’t a good idea.
The crank version, though simpler than the steam-ram would have been, still took a couple of weeks to build. Russia had lots of rivers but the Gun Shop had no waterfalls handy. There were, though, lots of peasants and more than a few out-and-out slaves. So a two-man crank to lift the hammer, which had a die of pretty good high-carbon steel, was more than possible. The hammer dropped on an anvil, which had its own matching die, and wham, one semi-finished part. The flash, the excess material, had to be removed and the part had to be finished, but that could be done by hand.
There had already been a couple of puddle steel foundries when Cass had gotten here. And the Gun Shop had a high enough priority to get some of the steel and have it shaped into the dies they needed.
It was when they were working on getting the steel that Cass remembered the advantages of a high failure rate. Andrei had been complaining about the crappy progress of the drop forge for making the chambers. Too many of the chambers were not fully formed. Cass remembered something about a supply of black-market computer chips, some spy story or cop story, where the chips turned out to be being made in the factory that made the legal ones, but were marked down as defective, then sold. So they worked out a deal where the parts that were “not good enough” were sold as scrap to an iron monger. They ended up having to cut in the iron monger for a small piece of the action and a cousin of Sheremetev for a bigger one, but it worked. And Cass had had a down-time made Colt six-shooter with him when he’d arrived. So they started making those on the side, and they were selling faster than he could make them. Not that they could make them all that fast here in Russia. These people were even more primitive than the Germans.
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
