Eric Flint - 1636:The Kremlin games

“Just listen to me,” David finally got out. “What the czar is being forced to do will destroy all order in Russia. We’ll be back to the Time of Troubles. Radio Moscow. There will be great rewards for those who support me in this.”

And they did. It took most of the rest of the night, but by the next morning David had his force. It was barely two hundred men, perhaps fifty of the service nobility and one hundred fifty of the Streltzi.

The next morning at the docks, they loaded up the ferry that ran to and from Nizhny Novgorod and Bor, and began taking men across the river.

“Don’t overload her!” Nick shouted. “I know she’s big, but she’s not a boat!”

“Are you sure this thing is safe?” Tami Simmons muttered to Bernie. “I don’t want my husband and kids, not to mention me, falling out of the sky.”

“Safer than any airplane in this century,” Bernie said. “And that guy over there is probably one of the most experienced dirigible pilots in the world.”

“And just how much experience are we talking about?”

Nick shrugged. “Not a lot. Maybe two hundred hours. But he’s the best we’ve got, and that’s the quickest way out.”

“Maybe we ought to take the steamboat,” Gerry Simmons said.

“Okay by me,” Bernie said. “But you’re the ones who have to talk to the czar and czarina about it.”

“Well, scratch that idea,” Tami sighed. “Alexsey is running a little fever.”

“Troops!” someone shouted. “Troops landing!”

“Landing where?” Bernie shouted back.

“On the banks of the Volga,” said Petr Kadian, one of the Gorchakov deti boyars. “That way!” He pointed.

Tim headed for him. “How many? What strength?”

Tim followed Petr Kadian down the street to where he could see the troops forming up down by the river, though forming up seemed rather a generous overstatement of the sort of milling mob that was down by the river. Part of that feeling was because Tim was a professional. Not a very old or experienced one, but a professional nonetheless. Part of it was that he was still very young and most of his experience was with game pieces, not men.

All of which didn’t mean that Tim wasn’t right. The force that David had raised in Nizhny Novgorod was only partly Streltzi and not the better part of Nizhny Novgorod’s Streltzi. They were filled out by peasants who had very little training. If they had been defending their city walls, they would have been fine. If they had been called up to fight off an invasion with time to get used to the idea, they might have done all right. But they had been drafted into a scratch force to go arrest the czar-and in one night. They weren’t sure if they should be obeying this stranger, whatever the radio telegraph said. Why should they trust the radio? It was new, it was a device, not a person they knew. They had seen the czar standing on a steam barge just the day before. They liked him. He had waved to them and so had the czarina. They really wished that political officer from Bor had just, well, stayed in Bor and not bothered them.

So they milled around, argued about where to stand and who was in front and who was behind in the line of march, and hoped that they would be too late. Tim didn’t know that was what was happening. He wasn’t experienced enough to know what was happening just by looking, but he was bright and had the right instincts. There was something very weak-looking about the force he was facing. He didn’t know what it was, but he could feel it. It was a big force. Almost twice as big as he had been expecting, something like two hundred men. But they didn’t have the AK4’s he’d been expecting. Two-thirds of them didn’t even have AK3’s; they had old match-lock muzzle-loaders. “Come on. Let’s form the men up,” he said to Petr Kadian.

That proved unnecessary. By the time they got back to the hangar, Ivan had the men they had brought with them from Murom formed up with the help of Princes Natasha’s more experienced guardsmen.

“So what do we do, General?” Ivan asked, with a grin.

Tim thought about it. The land between the river and the town was open; muddy bank fading to grassy field to streets and buildings. His force was outnumbered, but at the same time each of these people had sat down with the czar, the czarina, and Princess Natasha. They had talked with Bernie and Filip and they were volunteers who knew what they were fighting for. They could sit in the town and fight from behind the buildings. It would work, but it would get a lot of people killed. No, that isn’t the way.

“We’ll march out to meet them.”

Ivan gave him a look and Petr Kadian asked, “Why?”

“You saw them,” Tim said, still trying to figure out exactly what he had noticed about the invaders.

Petr Kadian nodded.

“Well, how did they look to you?”

Petr Kadian was by no means a military genius, but he had served the Gorchakov clan as an armsman and retainer for near twenty years. He had seen armies and he had seen battles. He had seen fierce resistance to overwhelming odds and armies coming apart in the face of a light breeze. He hadn’t noticed it when he was out there looking at the opposing force because it wasn’t his job to notice that sort of thing. But now that the boy general brought it up, he realized that those fellows out there were… “A rout waiting to happen, sir.”

That was what Tim had seen without quite knowing why.

Ivan, now that it had been explained, knew why. “We want them to see each other run.”

“More importantly, we want them to see that we won’t,” Tim said. “We want them to see us as a real army. The czar’s army. Small maybe, but real.”

They marched out in two columns with sergeants counting cadence loudly. When they were a little over one hundred yards from the still-milling mob from Nizhny Novgorod, they made a right turn and the columns stretched out into lines. Finally Tim called them to halt, then shouted, “Left, face!”

“Dress ranks!” Tim carefully paid no attention to the mob from Nizhny Novgorod as he watched the men dress their ranks, then as he walked down the line, commenting on uniforms and weapons. It wasn’t a bluff. Tim was quite sure these men would slaughter the mob they were facing. And it wasn’t a matter of bravery. Tim wasn’t sure how to put what it was. But he never would consider doing this if he were facing Sergeant Hampstead’s men. Nor if he were facing the Moscow Streltzi, even without the walking walls. Finally, he looked over his shoulder.

The mob of Nizhny Novgorod was no longer milling around, but they weren’t forming themselves into a unit either. They were just standing there, staring.

Tim shook his head. “All right, men,” Tim shouted. “On the command, the first rank will kneel and ready their rifles. Pick your targets. We want to hit as many in the first volley as possible. We will then wait till the breeze clears the smoke away before the second rank fires.” Tim looked back at the men across the field then continued, in as loud and penetrating a voice as he could manage, “There will be no reason to rush.”

A shot rang out. Tim didn’t spin or jump; he had been half-expecting it. He turned around to see a man near the end of the sort of arching line that the Nizhny Novgorod contingent had drifted into. There was smoke drifting from a musket in his hands. “Sergeant Kadian,” Tim said loudly.

“Yes, General?” Kadian asked.

“That uncultured fellow with the smoke coming from his musket is your target.”

“Right, General!” Kadian sounded quite pleased. And men started edging away from the fellow who had shot his musket.

“Very well. Where was I? After the first rank has fired and the air has cleared, the second rank will, on command, advance five paces, kneel, and fire. When the air has cleared again, the first will…”