1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 70

February 1636

Cass rode up to the Dacha with a mixture of trepidation and glee. He was finally going to get his own back from that traitor Bernie and his bitch Natasha. And he planned to have a little fun with that Anya chick, too. At the same time, Cass knew he had to be careful. Sheremetev and his gang weren’t the sort of people you crossed. But sooner or later, they’d get bored and leave the place fully in Cass’ control. Then he’d have the run of the place.

For several weeks things went along pretty much as they had before. The Dacha’s contacts with the outside world had always been limited; now they were the next best thing to nonexistent. Even contact with associated projects like the Czarina Evdokia, the large dirigible being built in Bor just across the Volga from Nizhny Novgorodi, or the foundry and gun shop located in Podol just a few miles away from the Dacha, were difficult and sporadic.

“I’d kind of like to know what Cass is doing here,” Bernie said. “And do we know anything about why Tami Simmons came to Moscow also, and with her whole family? She’s the American nurse.”

“The czar and czarina were so impressed with the spring typhoid reductions they decided to bring in a real up-time medical expert. Do you know her?”

Bernie shrugged. “In passing, the way people in a small town more or less know anyone else in the town. She’s from Kentucky, originally, and she’s a lot older than me. I know her husband Gerry a little better, but still not very well.”

Bernie looked around the room at the tense, worried faces, then back at Natasha. She was pale enough that she wouldn’t need the kabuki makeup women wore in Russia in the here and now. Bernie tried for something vague and unthreatening. “That Shuvalov dude seems like a pretty good guy. Do you think he’d let me send a message home?”

He hadn’t thought it was possible, but Natasha went even whiter.

“Don’t try it right now, Bernie,” she said. “Just leave it for a bit.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, Natasha? I know there’s something I’m missing here. Besides the armed soldiers, of course. And not seeing Boris for weeks. And the fact that everyone is tiptoeing around like ghosts while Cass is acting like Cass Squared.”

“Colonel Shuvalov is a deti boyar, a retainer of the Sheremetev family, Bernie. Rather like Nikita Ivanovich Slavenitsky is to my family.”

“Yeah. He’s pretty polite. Nice guy,” Bernie said. Not getting what this had to do with the price of beets.

“He goes out of his way to be cordial,” Natasha admitted. Her face got pinched. “But stop and think, Bernie. Colonel Shuvalov doesn’t push it, as you would say. But… he’s here for more than one purpose. My family, the Gorchakov family, were once independent princes. We retain the titles and are very wealthy. We’re just not as politically well-connected as some of the other great families. At least we hadn’t been. With the Dacha we were starting to become so. So Colonel Shuvalov has been selected…”

“He’s after you?” Now Bernie got it and he didn’t like it. He really didn’t like it. This sort of thing was bad enough when applied to some ordinary down-timer but applied to Natasha…?

Somewhere in a part of his mind that he usually tried to avoid, Bernie understood that his feelings for Natasha had gelled in a certain way. Quite a while ago, in fact. But he still had no idea what to do about it, Russian noble society being what it was-and now this just got dumped on him!

“That’s slavery… or something. Like something out of a book! One of my sister’s stupid romance novels.”

Natasha laughed bitterly. “Romance has very little to do with it. Through me, my family and its fortune will serve Shuvalov’s ambitions. Our… sons… will be boyars, great family boyars.”

“That stinks!”

“Calm down, Bernie. Don’t lose your temper,” Natasha said. “As long as we’re quiet and don’t make a fuss, Colonel Shuvalov will remain polite. He would much prefer to have a… mutually supportive relationship. But the relationship itself is in no way optional. Not on my part and not really on his. The basic motivation behind the match is to move my family’s wealth into the Sheremetev family’s control. It’s politics, Bernie. International politics as much as internal. Sheremetev is pro-Polish, anti-Swedish. The patriarch was anti-Polish, and so favored the Swede.”

“And Director-General Sheremetev has a reasonable point,” Filip said. “I like the concepts you up-timers bring, but Gustav Adolf is just another would-be emperor of the world. Not that different from Genghis Kahn or your Napoleon or Hitler.”

“Oh, come on. Gustav Adolf isn’t anything like Hitler,” Bernie said.

“And how is Gustav Adolf different from Adolf Hitler, in the up-timer histories?” Misha asked.

“He’s Swedish, not German.” Nikolai laughed.

“Hitler was… would have been… Austrian, not German. Gustav Adolf made himself emperor of Germany the same way Hitler did in that other history, and is at war with a lot of the same people. France, England, Poland.

“Which is just fine with me.” Nikolai wasn’t laughing now. “Useless Poles! With their false Dmitris, murder and looting. At least we taught them a lesson at Rzhev.”

“And after that?” Misha asked. “How long before Gustav Adolf’s Operation Barbarossa?”

“He’s too canny for that. After all, the histories make it quite clear how it turned out. Besides, the reports are that he’s out of commission because of the wounds he got at that battle last fall.”

Misha shrugged. “He may well recover. And if he doesn’t, we will have to deal with Oxenstierna, who is no better. Hitler was a lousy general and didn’t understand Russian winters. Gustav Adolf and Oxenstierna are very good generals and do understand Russian winters. That makes them more dangerous than Hitler, the way I see it.”

For a while Bernie let the conversation roll over him. He had been paying a bit more attention to politics since the coup, and he was having a lot of trouble making sense of it all. He appreciated that Gustav Adolf had ridden to the rescue of Grantville in the Croat raid, but he didn’t approve of the USE having a king or the New U.S. being reduced to just another state. It seemed like Mike Stearns had given up too much of what America had been up-time. Maybe he had no choice, but that didn’t make Bernie any more loyal to some Swedish king and his German prime minister.

Bernie came to another realization, at that point. The Ring of Fire had happened almost five years ago-and he’d spent more than four of those years in Russia. By now, Bernie had more friends in Russia than he did in Grantville. His Russian was fluent and idiomatic, even if he’d always have a fairly pronounced accent. So Natasha told him, anyway.

For that matter, the American he was probably closest to, Brandy, had gone and married a Russian herself. He had to face it. The America he knew-had been born in, raised in-was just gone. Gone forever. The USE that had sort of replaced it in this universe didn’t really mean much to him.

The truth was, the USE seemed just like another down-time nation. From where Bernie was sitting, there wasn’t really that much difference between Czar Mikhail with Sheremetev and King Gustav Adolf with Wettin. At this point, Bernie just hoped that the kings, emperors and czars of the world didn’t start a war that had up-timer fighting up-timer. He honestly didn’t know what he would do if that happened.

It wasn’t that Bernie had any love for the Russian government, because he didn’t. The czar himself seemed like a pretty decent guy but he wasn’t running the show-and serfdom just plain stank.

But that didn’t really matter. For good or ill, better or worse, Russia was his country now. It was where he lived, worked, and… had fallen in love, really for the first time in his life. It was the country where he’d healed himself, at least as well as he could. He owed Russia for that, if nothing else.

In for a penny, in for a pound, as the old saying went. He had no idea what to do, but he did know where he’d be doing whatever he did. Right here. In-ha! who would’ve guessed? — Mother Russia.

Natasha was still talking. “They don’t intend to take the family’s wealth away-just control of it. They consider it necessary, since while the Gorchakovs aren’t really one of the great families-we are one of the twenty but not one of the fourteen-we have acquired a degree of wealth and a set of connections that makes the family potentially disruptive if not brought to heel. Reined in, as it were.

“It could be a lot worse, Bernie,” Natasha pointed out. “Colonel Shuvalov is bright, charming, and a decent sort. He’s not… one of the worst. Not old. Not gross. More modern than some.”

Bernie didn’t really agree with Natasha’s assessment, even leaving aside his own desire for the woman. Shuvalov was also, unfortunately, completely loyal to his patron. He was aware of Sheremetev’s ambitions but didn’t feel that those ambitions absolved him of his duty. And if the ambition didn’t, neither did the greed that the Sheremetev family was famous for.

“He’s like… I dunno… some kind of samurai about duty and honor,” Bernie said. “And I kind of like him. But we can’t trust him because his loyalty will always come before his honor. If his boss tells him to feed us all to the pigs, that’s what he’ll do. I don’t see how we can get out of this mess. We don’t have enough men to do anything, and not enough weapons, either.”

“So we keep our mouths shut,” Natasha said. “We wait and we don’t cause trouble. For now, Director-General Sheremetev is busy making sure his position is consolidated. Shuvalov isn’t the worst. Let’s hope he’s left in charge here.”

The worst, as Anya well knew, certainly wasn’t Colonel Shuvalov. In her opinion, the worst was Cass. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, not at all. And she didn’t like the way he was treating the other girls at the Dacha.

And she dreaded the day Colonel Shuvalov left. Cass would have no restraints. More and more, Anya was convinced that they would have to escape.

Well, she’d done that before. But never with a princess in tow, much less an up-timer.

“He’s not the worst,” Aunt Sofia pointed out.

“He’s not the worst, he’s not the worst, he’s not the worst!” Natasha chanted and threw her hands in the air. “I know perfect well that he’s not the worst, dammit.”

“You’ve been around Bernie too long,” Sofia said. “Stop using that word, even in English.”

Natasha turned a stone face to her. “He’s not the worst. But he’s not what I want.”

“What do you want, child?”

“I don’t know yet. I haven’t had a chance to learn what I want.”

That wasn’t really true. She knew it-and judging by the expression on her face, her aunt Sofia knew it too. What Natasha wanted was Bernie, but that seemed as remote as the moon.

She paused a moment. “I want Vladimir. I wish I could talk to my brother.”

“Damn their eyes!”

For a moment, Brandy thought Vladimir was quoting another book. Then she realized that he was angrier than she’d ever seen him.

They were in the salon. She was reading a book and Vladimir was trying to catch up on the endless paperwork. He’d just opened the latest dispatch bag from Moscow. “What’s wrong?”

“You know that delayed mica shipment?” Vladimir leaped out of his chair and began pacing. “It wasn’t delayed because of weather or bandits. Well, not real bandits. The Boyar Duma delayed it. On purpose. They’ve also taken Czar Mikhail and his family hostage, along with that nurse and her family.” He thrust the letter toward her. “Look at this! Just look at it!”

Brandy was forced to push the papers away from her face. “Calm down, Vladimir. And talk sensibly. What else has happened?”

He pulled the papers back, then read from them. “Because of its vital importance to the state, the Dacha has been placed under guard.” Vladimir threw the paper onto the table. “That means they’ve got Natasha. And Bernie.”

Over the next few days, after Vladimir had calmed down a bit more, Brandy was able to read a translation of the offending papers.

Czar Mikhail and his family were safe, if being held hostage was safe. Not that they were officially being held hostage. They had “been moved out of Moscow to ensure the czar’s safety.” The up-time nurse Tami Simmons and her family were being held in the same place as the czar, so, again, they were safe. The manager at the mica mine, while nothing had yet been done to him, was being held under suspicion of “involvement in the recent unpleasantness.” Accusations of corruption had been laid against the manager… and against Vladimir himself.

No shipments of anything would be sent from Moscow or from Vladimir’s own lands. He was, effectively, broke.

Bernie and Natasha, along with the rest of the Dacha staff, were in “protective custody.”