Izmailov turned to the mercenary sergeant. "Did your scouts see the entire army. This so-called ten thousand man army?"
"No," Hampstead admitted. "My scouts saw the leading elements. About three thousand men. And that's still more than my five hundred could face with any hope of victory."
"How do you know it was the leading elements? Not the whole force?"
"The formation was spread out like a screening element. Why put a screening element out when there's nothing to screen?"
The answer to that seemed obvious to Tim . . . to hide the fact that that was all you had. To bluff. Still, the sergeant's point about the size of his force was well taken. Why bluff against a force of only five hundred men? Tim could think of two reasons. If the attacking force didn't know how big the force in Rzhev was, they might try a bluff to get a force of a thousand or fifteen hundred to retreat and avoid a battle against an entrenched opponent. Two to one odds aren't that great when the enemy is behind walls.
Or it could be that the bluff—if it was a bluff—was intended not for the sergeant but for . . . well, them. The relieving force. Tim looked over at the wagons holding the deflated Testbed and smiled.
General Izmailov was shaking his head. "There are a lot of reasons why you might arrange your troops in a pattern that will, at first sight, look like a screen . . ."
The commander of the Polish invaders had not, in fact, formed his force into a screen. He had split his force into three columns of a thousand men to facilitate gleaning. The scout had spotted the center column and swung wide around it which had taken him right into the second column. He had assumed that the two columns were the ends of a large screening element but hadn't checked.
* * *
There were four wagons in the dirigible contingent. One carried the dirigible, sort of. The wagon acted as an anchor for the dirigible while on the march. The dirigible floated about fifteen feet above it, and was cranked down to ground level and tied down with spikes driven into the ground at night or in bad weather. That wagon also carried a pump which weighed just under two tons. The pump was used to compress hydrogen gas for the canisters. Another wagon carried equipment and materials for the production of hydrogen gas. A third carried equipment for field repairs and the fourth carried the repair crew. After the aborted trip, they spent two days worth of breaks on the march doing maintenance before they felt safe with the thing untethered again. General Izmailov was not pleased.
"I'm sorry, General," Nick Ivanovich said. "But there is a reason we call the dirigible 'Testbed.' It's an experiment designed to test concepts in aviation. To the best of our knowledge, nothing quite like it has ever existed in this or any other history. The engines are handmade by Russian craftsman, as are the lift bladders, the wings." Nick hid a grin.
The designer would hate him calling the control surfaces "wings." They weren't designed to provide lift, but control. In fact, they provided a bit of both. The "wings" acted as elevators at the tail of the dirigible. More were located between the gondola and the motors. They didn't provide much lift, but by pointing the dirigible's nose up or down, he could gain or lose a little altitude without having to dump ballast or gas. Or use the emergency tanks to refill the lift bladders.
"They were well made, but by people who had no way to do more than guess about the stresses they would face. It's steam powered and if they had steam powered dirigibles up-time, we haven't heard about it. That's why they built it—to see."
"So why don't we have an improved version or one of the airplanes that the up-timers have?" Izmailov sounded impatient and gruff.
"Engines, sir. Ours are both heavy and weak They wouldn't get a heavier-than-air craft off the ground. There is one engine in Russia that might lift an airplane off the ground. That engine is in the car Bernie Zeppi brought to Russia." This wasn't entirely true, as Nick well knew. The engines they had built for the dirigible would get an airplane off the ground just fine. It was the added weight of the water, the boiler and the steam recovery that had so far made down-time-built steam-powered heavier-than-air craft imposable. Without the recovery system, a steam powered aircraft would work fine for a few minutes before the water was all used up. Water weighed a lot.
"So I will have the intelligence you can gather from your Testbed only when and if everything goes right? If nothing breaks on your toy and the weather is just right?" The general glared, then visibly shook himself. "All right, Captain. That's all."
* * *
The cavalry were equally unimpressed with the intelligence gathered by Nick. And more than a few of the cavalry were resentful. Scouting was a part of their function and, as far as they were concerned, the infantry was looking to take away the other part. They rode out almost gaily for the two days the dirigible was being repaired.
But, just like the dirigible, they found no traces of the enemy.
* * *
Sixty miles as the crow flies from Moscow, Nick was ready to try again. Mostly because they were launching from closer to Rzhev, but also because it was, luckily, a still, calm day. Nick made it to within five miles of Rzhev. At five thousand feet, he feathered the engines so he would have a stable platform, pulled out his telescope and started counting outhouses and camp fires.
* * *
"Three thousand men, General, more or less. They haven't burned the town, but it's not big enough to hold them all. They have built a camp next to it. No walls, not much in the way of defensive fortifications."
"Did they see you?"
Nick shrugged. "I can't say for sure. The Testbed is big and quite visible, but I was five miles away and a mile in the air. It depends on where they were looking. No one took a shot at me and they didn't seem disturbed when I looked at the town."
"Three thousand? Is that all?" Colonel Ivan Khilkov said. "Hell, General, we've got almost that many cavalry. Send us ahead; we'll ride them into the ground." The colonel was not a fan of the new innovations in warfare provided either by Western Europe or the up-timers.
General Izmailov hesitated and Nick knew why. Ivan Khilkov was young, but from a very old family. A very well-connected family, since one of his relatives was Patriarch Filaret's chamberlain. The general could deny him once or twice, but if he did it too many times, Izmailov would find himself relieved of command, and his career ended. Nick prudently kept his mouth shut.
***
Four days later, General Izmailov could no longer say no. Colonel Khilkov had sent mounted scouts directly to Rzhev.
"They are fortifying the town, albeit slowly. By the time the full column reaches Rzhev, the town will be fully fortified," Khilkov said. Then he sniffed. "Send us, General. We can get there quicker than this—" Khilkov waved an arm at the wagons. "—torturous mess. The cavalry can get there in two days. By the time you can get all this there, we'll have taken the town."
There was no way to avoid it, Izmailov knew. Against his better judgment—and with a tiny bit of worry for his future—he agreed. He might very well be sunk either way it went. If Khilkov won, he'd look bad. If Khilkov lost, his angry relatives would blame Izmailov.
* * *
"Khilkov and his forces are about ten miles from Rzhev, sir," Nick Ivanovich reported.
"Very well," Izmailov said. "Do whatever it is you need to do with your . . . Testbed. If he's that close, you should see the battle tomorrow." The general paused. "Take Lieutenant Timrovich with you." When Nikita started to object, General Izmailov held up his hand. "There's no choice in this. He is from a good family. If things go well tomorrow, it won't matter—but if they don't, you and I will need his report."
By this time, the main column was only about forty miles from Rzhev by air. Which, unfortunately, meant quite a few more miles on foot. Fortunately, it was short-hop range for the Testbed. Nick spent the rest of the day doing maintenance and preparing for the overloaded trip to Rzhev. The general consensus was that tomorrow he would have a ringside seat for a glorious feat of victory by Russian cavalry. General Izmailov clearly wa
sn't so sure, and Nick shared his doubt. There were probably a few others who were less than sanguine about the outcome. Sergeant Hampstead was one of them; his commanding officer, Captain Boyce, who had joined them on the march was another.
* * *
"I'm told I'm going with you."
Nick Ivanovich looked over at the young lieutenant. "Yes, so General Izmailov told me. That's why I'm pulling two of the four hydrogen tanks. We'll also be taking less ballast water and less fuel." Nick wasn't happy with the situation but he rather liked Tim, one of the more innovative young officers in the Russian army. And young was the word. Tim might be seventeen, but he looked closer to fourteen. "Bernie Zeppi said once that the glamour of flying would get to almost anybody. But it's bloody dangerous up there. A dirigible is a balancing act. Look there . . ." He pointed. "Those are the lift bladders. They pull the dirigible up but not by a constant amount. The higher you go, the thinner the air; as the air thins the bladders expand. As the bladders expand, they provide more lift."
"So the higher we go, the more lift?"
"Right. And that's part of the problem. Because the goal is to go up a certain distance, then stop going up. We can't add weight once we take off, so once we get to the height we want—actually before we get that high—I start releasing hydrogen from the bladders. Now what do you think happens when we start coming back down?"
"We get heavier."
"Right. But I've already thrown away the hydrogen that started in the bags. So to counteract that getting heavier, I add hydrogen from these tanks . . ." Nick pointed at the tanks in the gondola. ". . . if I've got enough. Or, I can turn this valve which releases water from a tank. But that water is the same water we use in the steam engines, so I can't dump it all or we run out of power. What happens if we start coming down and I'm out of hydrogen and water?"
"We crash."
"Right. Also the Testbed here has as much surface area as a three-masted schooner has sails." Well not really, Nick admitted silently, but it doesn't have a hull in the water holding it in place either. "So a sudden change in the wind and we can be a hundred yards away from where we want to be before I can even start to compensate. If we are facing into the wind, or close to it, the engines are enough to move us through the air. But if the wind is from the sides, the wind wins. If it rains on this thing, the weight of the water means even with all the ballast overboard and the bladders at capacity, we don't have enough lift. We had to drop the radiator more than once in tests at the Dacha and the aerodrome where they are working on the big one. We haven't had to drop the engines or the boiler yet but it's rigged to be able to."
Nick went on to explain about the various controls. The fifty pound weight that didn't seem like that much till you realized that it could be moved from the tip to the tail of the Testbed to adjust its balance and angle of attack. That not only the wings, but the engines at their ends rotated as much as thirty degrees, to provide last minute thrust up or down for takeoff and landing. Especially landing. The steam engines could reverse thrust with the turning of a lever, so the Testbed didn't need variable pitch propellers.
* * *
"It is a beautiful sight," Tim said. "Banners flying . . ." He paused a moment, then sighed. "A beautiful sight, noble and glorious. But at the Kremlin in the war games they treated pike units as fortified. Not easy to overrun. Colonel Khilkov didn't think much of the war games." In a way this was like one of those war games, an eagle's eye view. Tim had played a lot of them, and suddenly, as he watched, he could see the little model units on the field below. He remembered one of the games—an unofficial game—when one of his fellow students had had a bit too much to drink. And ordered cavalry to attack undispersed pike units. You were supposed to hit them with cannon first, to break up their formation. And he remembered those cavalry pieces being removed from the board. Igor had stood, held up one arm, wobbled a bit, lifted the arm again and proclaimed "But, I died bravely!" They had all laughed. Suddenly it didn't seem funny at all. "Colonel Khilkov thinks the Poles will break when faced with a cavalry charge . . . and General Izmailov didn't seem to agree."
"You're sounding a bit, ah, concerned there, Tim." Nick peered though his telescope toward the Polish forces.
Tim nodded. "Colonel Khilkov is . . . a bit difficult."
The Polish forces didn't flee. Three thousand Russian cavalry faced a wall of about two thousand Polish infantry, armed with pikes and muskets, as well as the Polish cavalry. The infantry stood in ranks and waited. Then they lowered their pikes and the Russian cavalry charge ran headlong into a porcupine made of men. Then the Poles fired. It was unlikely that the volley killed many men, but it was enough to shatter the Russian formation.
Then it was the Polish cavalry's turn. They were outnumbered but they were fighting a scattered unit. Colonel Khilkov tried to rally his men and almost managed it. But the Polish infantry had slowly—as infantry must—advanced while the Polish cavalry had been cutting its way through the Russians. Once their own cavalry was mostly clear, the Polish infantry opened fire again.
"It's all over, mostly," Nick said. There was, it seemed to Tim, a coldness in Nick's voice he had not noticed before. "We'd better head back to General Izmailov and tell him."
Tim nodded, tears blurring his sight. He kept seeing little cavalry units being picked up off a playing board while he looked at the clumps of bodies on the field. It was too far to tell but he knew many of the men in those cavalry units. He knew some of men whose bodies made up those clumps. "The general's not going to be happy."
The little boyars with their fine horses had left the field, those that still could. Routed by soldiers who worked for pay, not glory. Nikita restarted the engines and headed to the column.
* * *
By the time they got back to the column, it was crossing the Volga at Staritsa and Tim had himself well under control. He made his report and the general discussed the way the battle had gone. Whoever had commanded the Poles had kept his Cossacks in reserve. Which was a bit of a surprise; probably the greatest Russian weakness was in tactical mobility. Of course, a Russian army that was mostly cavalry was unusual, too.
"I am concerned about the loss of the cavalry," General Izmailov echoed Tim's thoughts. "The cavalry units were most of what tactical mobility we had. We can't afford to be caught away from the Volga. We'll need it for supply. It's a hundred miles along the Volga from Tver to Rzhev. I am going to take the main force straight to Rzhev. But I am sending Captain Boyce and his people along the river to grab up every boat they can find. You're going with them, Tim. I don't really think they'll bug out again, but better safe than sorry."
"Yes, sir. What do I do if they do bug out?"
"They won't. That's why you're going. I'm sending a squad of musketeers with you, but they are just to keep you safe. Captain Boyce knows that if his company fails in its mission, you'll take the musketeers and come tell me about it. Then he and his people won't get paid."
* * *
To supplement their rations, the Musketeers with their new AK3s went hunting between villages. Russia was sparsely populated compared to the rest of Europe and there was quite a bit of game. Captain Boyce and his sergeant were impressed with the guns. When they asked Tim about it, he called on one of the musketeers to do a show and tell.
Daniil Kinski set the butt of the AK3 on the ground and the tip of its barrel came not quite to his nose. If any of them had been familiar with the up-time weaponry, they would have noticed a marked similarity to a Kentucky long rifle. But that similarity was not complete. Like the long rifle, the AK3 was a flintlock with a long, rifled barrel. It was forty inches long, if you didn't include the chamber, which was four inches long. Daniil then lifted the AK3 and showed them how the chamber was removed. "The chamber, as you can see, is a steel case, not including the quarter inch lip that inserts into the bore of the barrel. Behind the lip, the front of the chamber is flat and supposed to fit flush to the bottom of the barrel. It doesn't always fit as flush as we'
d like, so we made some leather gaskets." He pulled the gasket off the chamber and showed them. "We still have the flash from the pan and the touch hole, but that's no worse than any flintlock."
Daniil stuck the gasket back on the chamber and the chamber back in the rifle primed the pan, cocked, aimed, and fired.
Crack!
Then he pulled the chamber out, stuck it in his pouch, inserted a loaded chamber with a gasket already on it into the AK3, primed the pan, aimed, and fired again.
Crack!
Relative to muzzle loading a musket it was very fast. Plus, since both shots had been aimed, they had both hit the tree that was his target . . . some eighty yards away from where they were standing.
Daniil pulled the second chamber from the AK3 then leaned the rifle against a tree while he showed them how to reload the chambers. Daniil filled the chamber with a measured amount of black powder then pulled out a lead cylinder "It doesn't use a round ball, it uses a Krackoff ball." Which an up-time observer would note had a certain resemblance to a Minié ball, in that it was a cylinder with one flat end and the other rounded. But it fit snugly into the chamber. "Push down till the Krackoff ball is flush with or a little below the lip of the chamber," Daniil said. The chamber wasn't cylindrical on the outside. Instead it was designed to fit into the AK3 only in such a way that the touch hole lined up with the flint lock on the side of the rifle.
* * *
A week later, while Tim and his crew were still collecting boats on the Volga, the Russian force surrounded Rzhev. In a way, General Izmailov was surprised. His force seriously outnumbered the forces in Rzhev and he had half-expected the commander of the Polish mercenary force to realize that and withdraw.
Janusz Radziwiłł had considered doing just exactly that. His officers had suggested it. However, Janusz was a young man who had already thrown the dice. If he retired from the game now, things could get really bad at home. Besides, the ease with which they had dispatched the cavalry suggested that they could hold and break the Russians against their recently built ramparts. So he allowed General Izmailov to reach the town, hoping to bait him into to another rash attack.