Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XV

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 wasn'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."