1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 80

“We forgot to destroy the radio,” Anya said as the barge was steaming down the Oka toward the Volga and Bor.

“You can’t think of everything. It was pretty wild in Murom when we left. It was looking like war was going to break out between those who wanted to follow us and those who didn’t want to lose their homes and their businesses.”

“Besides, Sheremetev knows we didn’t try to go west, so he’ll be coming after us and there aren’t a lot of directions we can go on the river. If we ain’t going upriver, we’re going downriver.”

“Sir, sir! We need help!”

Captain Ivan Borisovich Lebedev struggled out of his drink-sodden daze, trying to understand what this idiot was talking about. “What? Let Tim handle it.”

“But he’s not here. He left with Czar Mikhail and all those people. And we’ve got fires in the city! There’s fighting.”

“Fighting about what? And why aren’t the Streltzi doing anything about it?”

“But the Streltzi are gone. Most of them.”

“Is anybody still here?”

“Well, you are.”

And that’s when it finally penetrated. Ivan Borisovich Lebedev was in charge. Really, honestly, in charge. The thing he had tried to avoid his entire life had come upon him. He needed instructions. There was no one here to give them. That’s when Ivan thought of the radio room.

Half an hour later, in the radio room, still hungover, with a half-dozen of what passed for the “leading figures” of Murom, all of them shouting at him to do something, Ivan told the radio man, “Just report to Moscow what has happened here.”

The key started tapping. The locals kept yapping. And Ivan’s head kept pounding.

“One at a time! You, what’s your complaint?” Ivan said to a short, balding man with a pot-belly.

“The servants raided my shop and ran off! I want my goods back. And my servants back! What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to have you thrown in the cells if you don’t quiet down. Were these your servants?”

“I was renting them,” pot-belly said. “From the Gorchakov clan.”

“So these are some of the serfs that Princess Natalia… oh, my head… that Princess Natalia freed or whatever. What was all that about?”

An older man with graying hair said, “Yes, they were. About half the work force in this town were serfs of the Gorchakov clan that were shipped in from their estates to work in the various shops.”

“So, basically, they had a perfect right to leave,” Ivan pointed out.

“Of course not. We had a contract. The Gorchakov factor signed it.”

About this time there was an explosion outside. Ivan went to the window and looked out on a small town in flames. “We’ve got bigger problems than missing serfs.” He turned back to the radio operator. “What does Moscow have to say?”

The operator shrugged. “The message probably hasn’t even gotten there yet. It has to go through seven stations to get there.”

Back in Moscow, Director-General Sheremetev was having his own problems. He had orders out to arrest Princess Natalia and Bernie for treason, and, thanks to the new patriarch, heresy. However, even four years after the up-timer’s arrival, a single station going off line could stop the word from going out. Some of the steam barges and boats on the river system had spark gap transmitters or crystal receivers, but not all of them. Not even most of them. Which meant he had no idea where they had gone once they left Murom. And he was beginning to wonder if they had gone after the czar. Meanwhile, he hadn’t heard anything from Murom in the last few hours and they weren’t answering their radio.

Murom was over two hundred miles from Moscow by road and almost four hundred by riverboat. Cavalry would take at least four days, more probably a week, to get there. Riverboats would be faster but would leave them stuck on the river once they got to Murom. Meanwhile, the Gorchakov girl was running around Russia, spreading disaffection.

“Meanwhile,” Colonel Shuvalov suggested, “we should order the Nizhny Novgorod Streltzi to arrest Princess Natalia and the up-timer.”

“Are they dependable?” Sheremetev asked.

“I don’t know,” Shuvalov admitted. “I don’t know who the commander of the local Streltzi is and we haven’t appointed a political officer to Nizhny Novgorod yet. We should have, but we’ve been stretched very thin. We have one in Bor just across the river, but that’s because of the dirigibles. There may be some loyalty to the Gorchakov clan since the industry that is developing there comes in large part from the Dacha. How much loyalty that will buy is anyone’s guess.”

“Well, find out who is in command of the Streltzi there. That should tell us something.”

It took Colonel Shuvalov a few minutes to find out and it turned out that the Streltzi commander at Nizhny Novgorod was a bureau man, not a deti boyar. Just a bureaucrat trying to keep his head down.

“Send the orders under the authority of the Boyar Duma and the director-general, acting for Czar Mikhail, as usual,” Sheremetev said. “That should give us the far end of the pincer.” Sheremetev drew a line on the map with his finger going from Nizhny Novgorod up to Kineshma then sweeping the whole hand back toward Moscow. “Meanwhile, we need to get troops on their way from here. I want you to lead the cavalry contingent. And find me somebody trustworthy to take a couple of companies of infantry by riverboat.”

Sheremetev drew his finger along the map again, this time tracing the Moskva River to where it joined the Oka, and on up the Oka to Murom. “The riverboat will probably get there before your cavalry does. They will have farther to go, but steam engines don’t get tired.”

“I’ll be on my way at first light then,” Shuvalov said. “Soonest started, soonest finished.”

Dawn came and the cavalry and the riverboats left, and still no word from Murom. They weren’t answering their radio nor forwarding messages in any direction. That, unfortunately, wasn’t that unusual. The radio telegraph links were new and didn’t have nearly enough redundancy. Well, Murom did. It was the hub for its area because it had the greatest range and because it was the Gorchakov family seat. Which meant that as long as Murom was down, messages would have to go a long way around. So why was the Murom station not active? Sheremetev wondered. It made no sense. Had they gone back to Murom for some reason and if so why hadn’t they been arrested?

Sheremetev didn’t expect to hear from Colonel Shuvalov for four days. But, worried over the silence at Murom, he gave orders that all messages be brought to him immediately. He didn’t think to mention that the Boyar Duma no longer needed copies of the messages. And, honestly, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if he had. Selling copies of message traffic to interested individuals was a pretty obvious supplement to a telegraph operator’s pay, and in Russia of the time a telegraph operator who wasn’t selling copies was more likely to get fired than one who was.

When the news came, it was from Murom. The clerk handed Sheremetev a stack of sheets that had been typed as they came in. He didn’t mention the file copy or the three copies that had been sold to other interested parties. He also failed to mention that the sun was up or that there was air in the room. The obvious need not be commented on. They, the original, the file copy and the copies for sale were all typed on a special typewriter developed at the Dacha for use in the radio telegraph stations. It used the Cyrillic alphabet, but was all capital letters, because the more different code groups there were, the longer the code groups needed to be and the longer it would take to send any message. As had been explained to Sheremetev many times, but it still irritated him. However, that was a minor irritation compared to what was to come.

The first radio message Sheremetev received was semi-incoherent. It talked about Princess Natalia coming back to Murom with Czar Mikhail, freeing all the serfs in Russia, and Murom burning. It made no sense. Sheremetev sent the radio man back to the radio room to call for clarification.

The clarification, when it came, wasn’t very clear at all. So Sheremetev sent his own message.

PRINCESS NATALIA GORCHAKOV IS A TRAITOR TO THE BOYAR DUMA AND THE CZAR IS BEING HELD BY HER UNDER A SPELL. SHE AND HER UP-TIMER ARE TO BE SHOT ON SIGHT. THE CZAR IS TO BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY FOR HIS OWN SAFETY.

Having sent off that message, Sheremetev called in the new patriarch to endorse the fact that the czar was under a spell.

The greatly enlarged group that had left Murom on two riverboats were in ignorance of these orders till they were halfway from Murom to the confluence of the Volga and the Oka rivers. But one of their boats had a radio on it and it picked up the clackity-clack of the message being sent from one riverside station to the next.

After some discussion, they decided to stop at the next station.

They marched up to the station which was in a village on the side of the Oka river. The telegraph crew were a family of the service nobility, but the very lowest end. The village had five families and maybe twenty-five people. It supported itself by fishing and farming. The telegraph crew received the rents from the village and a small salary, which they used to support themselves. The mother, the father and the eldest daughter, as well as three of the serfs in the village, could operate the spark gap transmitter. A small steam engine ran the generator that charged the battery. When it broke down-which it did frequently-they made do with a foot-pedal.

Whether they would have attempted to arrest the czar had they been in a position to, who knows? They were in no position to arrest anyone. There were four old-fashioned guns in the whole village. Instead, the czar had them send both ways along the chain his own orders. First was a repeat of Princess Natalia’s proclamation of forgiveness of debt for the serfs tied to her family’s lands and his offer of freedom for any serf that chose to join him in Ufa.

“But what about my serfs?” complained the father, in dress not dissimilar to one of his serfs. “How is my family to live without the rents?”

“And yet the work of the station is done as much by your serfs as by you,” Anya said. The messages went out, and with a further message. Sheremetev was not to be obeyed. Czar Mikhail revoked his authority and ordered his arrest.

“That’s actually more than I have the authority to do without the concurrence of the Boyar Duma and the Assembly of the Land, so I don’t really expect those orders to be obeyed. But they ought to muddy the waters.” And they did. The telegraph stations responded on the basis of personal choice. Some passed Sheremetev’s messages and not the czar’s, some passed the czar’s and not Sheremetev’s, some passed both, and a few passed neither.

The telegraph operators talked about what was going on. Most of them had been trained at the Dacha and most of them were of the upper end of the Streltzi class or the lower end of the service nobility. They were free, not serfs. Not tied to the land, but they worked for a living. Their pay was a farming village or an income, depending on where the station was located. Most of them had moved to the place they now occupied because they had been assigned to it.

Unanimity was noticeable by its absence.